18 September 2026 — 24 January 2027

Simone Fattal: Cities at the Bottom of a Lake

This autumn the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris devotes a major exhibition to Simone Fattal, a Lebanese-American artist born in Damascus, Syria, in 1942 and long based in Paris. Bringing together around one hundred works, the exhibition spans more than fifty years of her practice, from early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages. Arranged in successive groupings rather than chronologically, it invites visitors to explore the key themes of a diverse and constantly renewed body of work. Passionate about literature and archaeology, Fattal first studied philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut and then at the Sorbonne, while also taking classes at the École du Louvre. She began painting in Beirut in the late 1960s, tirelessly depicting trees, the sea and mountains and pushing figuration to its limits. In 1972 she met the Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan (1925–2021), with whom she shared nearly fifty years of life and creative partnership. Forced to leave Lebanon in 1980 by the civil war, Fattal settled in Sausalito, California, north of San Francisco Bay. She set painting aside to found the publishing house The Post-Apollo Press (1982–2017), named after the Apollo space programme, which she saw as the dawn of a new era in human history. In 1988 she took up ceramics after classes at the College of Marin and the San Francisco Art Institute. From clay emerged archaic anthropomorphic and animal figures inspired by the mythological epics of the Mediterranean world, especially Mesopotamia and ancient Greece – from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad and the Odyssey. The 2010s saw the end of The Post-Apollo Press and her definitive return to Paris. Alongside sculptures and collages exploring personal and collective narratives, landscape painting returned: rapid, colourful watercolours and black ink drawings of plant motifs express her vision of a nature driven by boundless vital energy. The first exhibition of her work in a Parisian museum, it pays tribute to a major artist who is internationally renowned yet rarely shown in France. It is accompanied by a catalogue made in close collaboration with the artist, minimalist in design and richly illustrated, with new texts including a contribution by Penelope Curtis, former director of Tate Britain, a text by Fattal herself and a biography – a book that highlights her many-sided creativity as visual artist, writer and publisher.

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris