F ormerly in the personal collects ion of the artist and gifted directly to the present owners, Untitled is an exceedingly rare example of the artist’s coveted flower compositions – and the first work from this important series to ever be offered at auction. Over the course of a lifet.mes spanning almost a century, Adnan produced a wide-ranging oeuvre of painting, textile, drawing, writing, and poetry. Celebrated for decades as a renowned poet and novelist, Adnan’s artistic practice has just recently been elevated to a level of equal cultural relevance. Recent solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam are evidence of the growing critical recognition of her artistic output, which Adnan has long considered central to her creative and intellectual vision.

Growing up in French-occupied Lebanon to a Syrian-Greek family and later settling in the United States, Adnan had a uniquely global outlook. Working as a professor of Philosophy in Northern California, Adnan took up painting in the late 1950s in response to the Algerian War, which prompted her to stop writing in French and famously declare she would instead begin “painting in Arabic.” The present work is exemplary of the meditative process that would follow, which hardly changed over the course of Adnan’s 60-year career and became an intellectual and emotional anchor for her wider creative practice.

Whereas Adnan’s literature was resolute in its critique of colonialism, war, and social injustice, her visual practice was more personal – informed by spirituality and nature and providing an emotional escape from the world around her. Reflecting on the contrast between her writing and painting, Adnan has said, “It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.” Seated at her desk with a small canvas laid flat on the table, Adnan would apply oil paint directly to the surface with a palette knife, spreading rhythmic blocks of color across the canvas with fast, confident strokes. Her highly textured and built up surfaces offer a sense of energy and immediacy, while her rhythmic, essentialist compositions offer a meditative counterweight. Simple geometries recur throughout her paintings, from colorful circles suggesting the sun to narrow rectangles marking the sky and sea. Over t.mes , these shapes developed into a unique visual language through which Adnan would construct her pensive compositions. Adnan also found inspiration in art history, quoting a range of sources from de Staël’s French landscapes to the geometric abstractions of Paul Klee and Josef Albers. Adnan’s partner Simone Fattal has described her paintings as playing “the role the old icons used to play for people who believed. They exude energy and give energy. They shield you like talismans. They help you live your everyday life.”

In her flower series, Adnan continues her exploration of art history, recalling the reductive surfaces of Cezanne and evoking the quiet stillness of Morandi’s still lifes. Moreover, while they are rare in her painted oeuvre, flowers are a recurring and important theme in Adnan’s written practice and the subject of one of her most celebrated poetry collects ions titled The Spring Flowers Own. As a test.mes nt to its importance and personal relevance to the artist, the present work was previously hung prominently in her home in Lebanon before the artist generously gifted it to the present owners in the 1990s.

Excerpt from: Etel Adnan, “The morning after / my death”, from The Spring Flowers Own, 1990

Artist

Etel Adnan