Simone Fattal

Simone Fattal is a Lebanese-American artist known for her ceramic sculptures, paintings, and collages that blend history and personal memory to explore the theme of displacement. Simplistic and abstract in form, Fattal's sculptures evoke artifacts from archaeological sites and often draw from religious texts, poems, and ancient stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and Dhat al-Himma.

Simone Fattal studied philosophy, first at the Ecole des Lettres in Beirut and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. During her studies, she also enrolled at the Ecole du Louvre. Upon her return to Beirut in 1969, Simone Fattal began her career as a painter, capturing the brightness of Lebanon in works like "La Montagne, Liban" (1973) and "Interior Spring" (1974). It was in Beirut that Fattal met the artist and poet Etel Adnan, who has been her partner and collaborator since then.

The outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 soon interrupted Fattal's artistic career, and she continued painting until 1980 when she moved to California with Adnan. In California, she founded Post-Apollo Press. Specializing in poetry, experimental writing, and translation, Fattal's publishing house has printed, among others, Adnan's novel "Sitt Marie Rose" (1978) and poetry books.

Fattal returned to making art in 1988 with "Torso Found in Today's Downtown Beirut," her very first sculpture.