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‘This Beautiful Light’ is dedicated to Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a leading artistic and literary voice of Arab-American culture, on the centenary of her birth. Celebrating the multi-faceted work of Adnan, this comprehensive exhibition explores the interrelated motifs, mediums and concerns she developed over the course of six decades, and which have come to define her practice.
Born in Beirut to a Greek mother and a Syrian father, Adnan grew up speaking Greek, Turkish and Arabic at home, and French at school. She left to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, then moved to America in 1955, where she attended UC Berkeley and Harvard. It was not until her mid-thirties, while teaching Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, that she started painting. In the earliest of these tentative experiments, she painted by using up the ends of oil tubes, applying it directly to the canvas with a palette knife in decisive swipes. The spontaneity of...More
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Press Release
‘This Beautiful Light’ is dedicated to Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a leading artistic and literary voice of Arab-American culture, on the centenary of her birth. Celebrating the multi-faceted work of Adnan, this comprehensive exhibition explores the interrelated motifs, mediums and concerns she developed over the course of six decades, and which have come to define her practice.
Born in Beirut to a Greek mother and a Syrian father, Adnan grew up speaking Greek, Turkish and Arabic at home, and French at school. She left to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, then moved to America in 1955, where she attended UC Berkeley and Harvard. It was not until her mid-thirties, while teaching Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, that she started painting. In the earliest of these tentative experiments, she painted by using up the ends of oil tubes, applying it directly to the canvas with a palette knife in decisive swipes. The spontaneity of...More