ETEL ADNAN: THIS BEAUTIFUL LIGHT
White Cube is pleased to announce ‘This Beautiful Light’, an exhibition dedicated to Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a leading artistic and literary voice of Arab-American culture, on the centenary of her birth.
January 22 - March 1, 2025
Celebrating the multi-faceted work of Adnan, this comprehensive exhibition explores the interrelated motifs, mediums and concerns she developed over the course of six decades, and which have come to define her practice.
The artist’s watercolour leporellos are folded books that extend to several metres long. Much like a scroll, they demand intimacy through handling and offer a durational experience of painting. Delaying gratification through the reveal of the pages and the interplay of surfaces as they unfold, the leporellos are Adnan’s reflection upon her twin positions as artist and as writer, and testify to her unique inhabitation of the space in-between.
The tapestries establish another connection between writing and painting – as Adnan succinctly observed, ‘a tapestry is one line after another.’ Taking inspiration from the flat weave of rugs and kilims, and encounters with weavers in Tunisia and Egypt, she started experimenting with tapestry-making in the 1960s. Unlike her approach to painting, however, the tapestries are fabricated by loom over expanses of time with a slower pace of production. Many of the new works that feature in ‘This Beautiful Light’ fulfil Adnan’s wish to transpose certain of her 1960s drawings to tapestry, and have been created posthumously with the help of Simone Fattal, her long-time partner, and the expertise of French artisans Pinton, who are known for their collaborations with Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder and Sonia Delaunay, amongst others.
Similarly, a ceramic mural installed in the ground floor gallery is devoted to an apple tree drawing Adnan made, and points to the unrealised works and curtailed material explorations the artist was invested in at the time of her passing. It is as Adnan has written: ‘Some weight has fallen over my house (it spared the apple trees in the garden). In the interval, many thoughts expressed in many languages have piled up.’