Simone Fattal

Simone Fattal’s work bridges the ancient and the contemporary, drawing on mythology, archaeology, and personal memory to create sculptures and paintings that are at once timeless and deeply present. Her raw, often unglazed clay figures evoke the remnants of lost civilizations, yet they resist the status of archaeological artifacts, retaining a palpable vitality that speaks to endurance and transformation. Through abstraction and fragmentation, Fattal explores the fluidity of identity, exile, and the passage of time, giving form to works that seem to surface from history while remaining resolutely alive in the present.

Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus, Syria) lives and works in Paris, France. After growing up in Lebanon, she studied philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut and later at the Sorbonne in Paris. Returning to Beirut in 1969, she began exhibiting her paintings before leaving Lebanon in 1980 during the Civil War. Settling in California, she co-founded the Post-Apollo Press with her partner Etel Adnan, publishing innovative and experimental literature. In 1988, she resumed her artistic practice through ceramic sculpture after studying at the Art Institute of San Francisco, and since 2006 has worked with Hans Spinner's ceramics workshop in Grasse, France.

Recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Ocean Space, Venice (2023); Portikus, Frankfurt (2023); Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich (2022); ICA, Milan (2021); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2020); National Museum of Qatar, Doha (2019). Her work was included in The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani for the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). In 2024, she participated in the Holy See Pavillion at the 60th Venice Biennale with the group exhibition With My Eyes, curated by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine, and presented a solo exhibition, Voix des antiquités orientales, at the Department of Antiquities of the Louvre (2024).

The artist's first retrospective, Works and Days, was held in the United States at MoMA PS1, curated by Ruba Katrib (2019). Her second retrospective, Des villes au fond d’un lac, was presented in France at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, curated by Jessica Castex (2026).