Simone Fattal, Des villes au fond d’un lac

In autumn 2026, the Paris Museum of Modern Art dedicates a major exhibition to Simone Fattal, a Lebanese-American artist born in 1942 in Damascus, Syria, who has lived in Paris for many years.

Bringing together around a hundred works, the exhibition traces over fifty years of her artistic journey, from early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages. Organized as a sequence of ensembles and deliberately non-chronological, the exhibition's itinerary invites visitors to explore the throughlines of a body of work that is diverse and in continual renewal.

A lover of literature and archaeology, Simone Fattal first pursued philosophy studies at the Beirut School of Letters, then at the Sorbonne, complementing her training with courses at the École du Louvre.

By the late 1960s, it was in Beirut that she began painting, tirelessly depicting trees, the seafront, and mountains, pushing the boundaries of figuration. In 1972, she met Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and painter, with whom she shared almost fifty years of life and creative complicity. In 1980, compelled to leave Lebanon due to the civil war, Simone Fattal settled in California, in Sausalito, north of the San Francisco Bay. She then temporarily abandoned painting to devote herself fully to founding The Post-Apollo Press (1982–2017), whose name draws on the Apollo space program in which she perceives the onset of a new era in human history.

From 1988, she engaged in a ceramic practice after taking courses at the College of Marin and the San Francisco Art Institute. From clay emerge archaic figures with anthropomorphic or animal lines, drawing their inspiration from the mythological epics of the Mediterranean basin, mainly Mesopotamia or ancient Greece, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The 2010s mark the end of The Post-Apollo Press's editorial interlude and her definitive return to Paris. Alongside sculpture and the production of collages with intimate and collective narratives, landscape painting reappears. Executed with bold strokes, colorful watercolors and black ink with vegetal motifs convey her vision of a nature animated by a boundless life force.

This first museum exhibition in Paris pays tribute to a major artist internationally recognized but who has rarely been shown in France.

A catalogue developed in close collaboration with Simone Fattal completes the exhibition. Minimalist in design, the monograph reproduces a wide selection of the works presented. Alongside substantial iconography, it offers unpublished texts, including a contribution by Penelope Curtis, former director of Tate Britain, as well as a text signed by the artist herself, and a biography. Blending critical rigor with an intimate perspective, this volume highlights Simone Fattal’s protean creativity as a visual artist, author and publisher.

With the support of:

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