Etel Adnan Captured the Light of Many Suns

Natalie Haddad | Hyperallergic | 4th February 2025

Before her painting career, Adnan was a successful writer. Little surprise, then, that her paintings are sometimes referred to as ‘tone poems’. Her multicultural early life in Lebanon and Paris gave her art an “ambiguous sense of place”. Exuberant colours and abstract shapes impart a modernist feel to her paintings while her tapestries summon associations with Middle Eastern kilim rugs. Out of that cultural multiplicity, says one critic, Adnan offers “the possibility of another world”.