Yves MichauxEtel Adnan: Découverte de l’immédiat

During the year 2021, Etel Adnan, who passed away on November 14 at the age of 96, had mainly devoted herself to the creation of an impressive series of paintings on canvas in black and white. The artist, who had previously taken so much pleasure in spreading pure colour with a knife, had seized the brush and a single colour to depict what she called her “discovery of the immediate”: flowers, fruit, inkwells, bottles…
To these paintings, which are like pictorial snapshots, have been added other paintings entitled Intrusion of Memory where memories of mountains and landscapes are juxtaposed with still life. Immediate data from the consciousness and images from the memory cohabit. Deliberately, Etel Adnan has chosen neither the easy way nor the repetition. She continues to surprise us with these austere but luminous works whose presentation in lines and groups reveals their coherence.
The international audience for her work has only grown during 2021 (exhibitions at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, the Centro C3A in Cordoba, Spain, the Centre Pompidou in Metz and the creation of a large ceramic for the auditorium of the new Luma Foundation in Arles). The year 2022 will see exhibitions in Tenerife, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam…