White Cube is pleased to announce Etel Adnan: This Beautiful Light, the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist’s work since her passing in 2021, and the first in New York following her major solo presentation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the same year.
Showcasing works from the last 20 years of Adnan’s artistic practice, the exhibition presents paintings, tapestries, leporellos—accordion-folded books that stretch several meters in length—and a large-scale ceramic wall mural. Measuring over 3 x 4 meters, the mural is based on a drawing by the artist and recalls a work recently exhibited at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami.
Born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon, to a Greek mother and Syrian father, Adnan first came to prominence as a writer, poet and journalist. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy of artand aesthetics at Dominican College in San Rafael, California (now Dominican University of California).
It was during the early years of her teaching tenure that Adnan turned to painting. Her language of spontaneous gesture, infused with Californian light, offered a liberation from the constraint of writing in French—the formal language of her upbringing. ‘I didn’t need to write in French anymore’, she said, ‘I was going to paint in Arabic.’ Throughout her artistic practice, geometric forms rendered in blocks of pigment serve to capture the spirit or memory of a place at a particular moment in time. While many of Adnan’s paintings are intimate in scale, her practice evolved over the years in both medium and size, most notably through the introduction of leporellos and tapestries.
The tapestries featured in Etel Adnan: This Beautiful Light are inspired by Tunisian and Egyptian weaving. They are created in collaboration with artisans at Manufacture PINTON in France, with production spanning extended periods to accommodate the intricacy of the artist’s designs.
The exhibition also showcases a number of the artist’s late series of untitled paintings, created in her Paris studio. In these works, elements are irradiated and condensed, shapes float without intersecting, while color itself emerges as a subject. Some works in this series, rendered in pastel on paper, also recall her early artistic explorations.
Adnan’s work reverberates with the influence of her surroundings, reflecting both the natural and politicized contours that shaped her life. Much like her seminal essays and poems, her visual art reflects a singular voice and an intuitive, elemental approach to translating lived experience into artistic expression.
Press release from White Cube
Image: Etel Adnan. Installation view of This Beautiful Light at White Cube New York, 22 January – 1 March 2025 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska
