Simone Fattal is an artist born in Syria in 1942 and raised in Lebanon. Fattal studied philosophy in Paris and established herself as an artist in the late 1970s in Beirut, where she exhibited her paintings until the start of the Lebanese civil war. She left Lebanon in 1980 and settled in California, where she founded The Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary works. In 1988, she enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute to go back to making art and activate a new dedication to sculpture and ceramics.
The exhibition Suspension of Disbelief is the artist’s first exhibition in Spain and brings together 85 works spanning a timeframe from 1999 to 2023. Simone Fattal’s multidisciplinary practice conceives time as an elastic entity that transcends distinctions between past, present and future. Her work draws on mythology, spanning from ancient Egypt to Sunni mysticism and Greco-Roman tradition, creating archetypal figures that integrate historical narratives into the present.
Predominantly sculptural, her work is undertaken in a multicultural and nomadic space, different from that of official history. This space transports the viewer to a “historical place” of an almost archaeological, multilingual and polytheistic nature that, even so, exists and manifests itself in the present.
Through media such as sculpture, painting and photography, Fattal explores the limits of figuration, drawing inspiration from historical figures of the Mediterranean, creating a cosmogony of resistant bodies and architectures. Her sculptures in bronze, clay and stoneware evoke literature, Sumerian tales, Arabic epics and Sufi poetry. Angels, centaurs, heroes and gods join architectural ruins and figures of fruits and animals, alluding to the loss of
historical places such as Palmyra or Aleppo. These works, timeless and simultaneously archaic and modern, reflect on humanity and its place in the world and history.
Fattal has been awarded the 2024 Julio González International Prize for her contribution to contemporary art. To commemorate the award, the IVAM is organising this exhibition which reviews the main lines of work of this Franco-Lebanese artist.
Press release from IVAM (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern)
Image: Simone Fattal. Installation view of Suspension of Disbelief, IVAM. 2024. Photography by Miguel Lorenzo. Image courtesy of the artist
