Simone Fattal

Simone Fattal’s work bridges the ancient and the contemporary, drawing from mythology, archaeology, and personal memory to create sculptures and paintings that feel both timeless and immediate. Her raw, often unglazed clay figures evoke traces of lost civilizations, yet they resist being mere artifacts, retaining a vital presence that speaks to endurance and transformation. Through abstraction and fragmentation, Fattal’s work explores the fluidity of identity, exile, and the passage of time, offering forms that seem to emerge from history while remaining resolutely alive.

Simone Fattal was born in 1942 in Damascus, Syria and currently lives and works in Paris, France. After growing up in Lebanon, she studied philosophy at the Ecole des Lettres of Beirut and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969 she returned to Beirut and started painting. She participated in numerous shows during the ten years when life in Lebanon was still possible. In 1980, fleeing the Civil War, she settled in California and founded, alongside her partner Etel Adnan, the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work. In 1988, she returned to artistic practice by doing ceramic sculptures after enrolling at the Art Institute of San Francisco. Since 2006, she has produced works in Hans Spinner’s prestigious workshop in Grasse, France. In 2013, she released a movie, Autoportrait, which has been shown worldwide in many film festivals. Best-known for her sculpture, Fattal’s work also includes painting, collage, and film. Recent solo exhibitions include Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany; Ocean Space, Venice, Italy; Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, Germany; CA Milano, Milan, Italy; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway; MoMA PS1, New York, USA; National Museum of Qatar, Doha, Qatar. Her work was - included in The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, the main program at the Venice Biennale in 2022. Simone Fattal participates in the 60th Venice Biennale at the Holy See Vatican Pavilion as part of the group exhibition "With My Eyes," curated by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine. The artist is also invited for a series of talks, "Leçon d’artiste," and for artworks display in the Antiquity Department of the Louvre in 2024.