The late artist’s exhibition at White Cube‘s New York space includes work she had envisioned for production immediately before her death four years ago.
The key to an artist’s immortality is, perhaps, to have the opportunity to create work after death. As much as a desire for life after demise, an artist’s trust in their art’s ability to defy time and material is a grand resistance to their swan song.
This is surely the case for Etel Adnan, who passed away in 2021 in Paris at the age of 96. The Lebanese-American painter, poet and philosopher’s exhibition, This Beautiful Light, at White Cube in New York coincides with the month marking what would have been her 100th birthday. The show features several tapestries produced posthumously in France and based on the artist’s intention to transfer some of her watercolours from the 1960s into woven form.
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska)
More turbulent and even galactic in comparison to her poetic oil-on-canvas landscapes, these spaced out configurations contain loosely defined forms, akin to the exhilarating unpredictability of a poem written in stream of consciousness. The alignment between Adnan’s motifs and words is surely an innate foundation of her beloved nature paintings, in which mountains, rivers, skies and the sun settle in uncompromising harmonies, much like the fluid firmness of a rhythmic verse. The show also features a handful of her arrestingly timid yet unexpectedly explosive paintings of soothing sunsets and moody hilltops.
The tapestries, however, summon a galvanic outlook for reverie. Mont Rouge, which was woven in 2022, gives ample space to the titular crimson hill while a suggestion of a sun and potentially another far off mountain remains untethered from its grandiosity. Autour des Lacs (2019) inhabits a joyous state of fluidity, unrestrained from mimicking a tangible topography. Bright washes of hue sway with the synchrony of a collective dance movement in which each colour claims its own autonomy. Adnan’s intimate hand gestures in watercolour are maximised to a grand statement in the tapestry’s 128 x 178 centimetre scale. The loom’s own rhythmic accordance lends another veil of tactility to the original work’s mercurial dynamism.
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska)
Unlike the condensed compositions of her oil paintings, Adnan’s watercolours and their tapestry avatars enjoy a chromatic turbulence and the convenience of a possible non-place. Marché Estival 1960s (2022) and Désert Ensoleillé 1960s (2023) completely embrace visual and literal abstraction, brimming with zigzagging washes and blotched pools. They revel in their decisive liberation from a linear logic and suggest free-spirited contemplation, which is fitting for the Adnan of 1960s, when she was a philosophy professor at the Dominican University of California.
For an artist whose adaptation to various cities, languages and lives constitutes a pillar of her practice, the material plethora on view in this show invites different paths of existence. Apple Tree (2021), a towering ceramic mural of 88 tiles, depicts spring blossom in its beaming colours more so than its figuration. Hints of apples dot the lush greens, accompanied by energetic pinks, yellows, blues and reds in ceramic’s shiny finish. The glorious rise of a tree embraced by juicy crops brims with ambition for Adnan, who embarked on the work in the year she passed away. On our end, the initial feeling is perhaps of hope, one for the tree’s eternal blossoming every spring a beautiful way of immortality in its own way.
