Untitled
Etel Adnan
ETEL ADNAN, 2010. OIL ON CANVAS.
“ Every painting by [Paul] Klee”, Annan once said of her artistic hero and early influence, “is like an act of discovery, achieved through a process of exploration, like a boat in the ocean.” To look at her work is to see much the same process - a compositional world rife with color and figuration that seems to morph and change before our very eyes. Centered with a sun like mass, simple forms in rudimentary but perfectly balanced color move around it, offering interpretations of landscape but not requiring such formal or prescriptive description. It is unsurprising, not just in looking at Adnan’s paintings, to see a kinship between herself and Paul Klee, one of the great geniuses of early 20th century modernism. Like Klee, Adnan cannot be defined simply by one practice, and does not want to be. She is considered one of the most important and certainly most celebrated Arab writers of the modern age. As a poet, essayist, and journalist, Adnan pushes the written word to bold, unusual, tender, and exciting spaces - writing on myriad topics yet finding such lyrical life in all of them. Her visual art, like Klee’s, should not be seen or understood differently, simply as a different medium to express consistent ideas and questions; her brilliance can not be bound to simply paper or canvas alone, and throughout her life she let it find its home wherever it sought refuge.