The Etel Adnan parade continues after this Summer’s show in London at the Serpentine Gallery on to Paris’s Institute of the Arab World where there will be a retrospective.
The Financial Times decided to run a short profile of the artist:
Previously accustomed to working in spurts, in the last few years Adnan has found herself painting nearly every day to keep pace with the voracious demand for her work. In 2012 Adnan’s oil paintings and leporellos (books filled with her illustrations and writing which unfold like accordions) were a big hit at Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Since then she has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s last biennial and had solo shows at London’s White Cube and Serpentine (artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist is a notable champion of her work) galleries and the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha.
The irony of this belated attention does not escape Adnan. “I’ve never been so busy,” she says. “My energy goes down as my invitations go up and I begin to make money when I can’t use it.” Adnan’s latest solo show is a career retrospective at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Adnan has somewhat bittersweet feelings about the show, which exhibits her paintings and poetry, as well as her designs for tapestries and ceramics.
Etel Adnan: interview (Financial Times)
