NYAB Event - Etel Adnan Exhibition

Etel Adnan Exhibition

Callicoon Fine Art

This event has ended.

Callicoon Fine Arts presents an exhibition of paintings by Etel Adnan.

Coming at the end of a stunning presentation of works spanning several decades at this year’s dOCUMENTA (13), the exhibition will be Adnan’s first one-person show in New York. Comprised of oils on canvas dating from 2000, the paintings are small in size, but replete with bright color and bold form. The focus of the majority of these paintings is the San Francisco Bay Area’s Mount Tamalpais, the leitmotif of her visual work since moving to California in the late 1950s.

For Adnan, Tamalpais became a locus of constant attention, its pull generating painting after painting as well as a book-length essay, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, published in 1986. The book is a meditation on the aesthetic ramifications of painting the mountain, living under its constant gaze and the community of artists Adnan found in its shadow who encouraged her to paint. Sea and Fog elaborates many of the themes first developed there, and each painting can be understood as a highly compressed invocation of the experiences and ideas that Adnan’s intervening books develop.

As Simone Fattal writes in her essay, On Perception: Etel Adnan’s Visual Art, “Adnan’s paintings play the role the old icons used to play for people who believed. They exude energy and give energy. They grow on you like talismans. They help in living everyday life. More often than not I have noticed that people who have Adnan’s paintings will keep them in the their innermost chambers, and not in their living rooms as objects d’art. The quickness of their making, the fact that they are finished in one sitting, their compactness - with nothing diluted or lost joins to the happiness experienced while painting, the joy of using color. They reflect the praise of the universe, the experience of it, immersion in it, participation in its formation. No lamentation, no elegy. Love.”