“This unfinished business of my/childhood/this emerald lake/from my journey’s other/side/haunts hierarchies of heavens,” wrote the late artist Etel Adnan in her poem “The Spring Flowers Own” (1990). In her exhibition This Stunning Mild at White Dice, an emerald coloration discipline unfurls on a wall-sized grid of ceramic tiles. Among the many uneven washes of inexperienced are blocks of main colours and a multicolored form thrusting diagonally throughout the image airplane, making a sensation of whirring movement.
This work, “Apple Tree” (2021), is the clear centerpiece, however work and tapestries comprise the vast majority of the two-floor exhibition. The small work on view allude to each landscapes and geometric abstraction. Their swaths of coloration, utilized with a palette knife, evoke eroding kinds, or the dominance of nature’s will over humankind’s. In a single untitled composition, parched greens and earth tones cohere right into a mountainous panorama drenched in late afternoon mild; in one other, blocks of coloration recommend an inside with an indirect view of a window. In almost all, the pictures appear to vibrate from the chromatic distinction.
Set up view of Etel Adnan: This Stunning Mild at White Dice New York; middle: “Apple Tree” (2021) (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025; photograph © White Dice; photograph by Frankie Tyska)
The intense, saturated colours and gestural marks of Adnan’s tapestries diverge from the work’ muted hues and geological kinds. Though some resemble landscapes, as within the tree-like “Figues” (2021) and “Oasis” (Sixties), with its abstracted cacti and blazing pink solar in opposition to a crimson sky, most level to mark making as a lot as picture making. The dye stains the thread to create an indelible mark much like these in her leporellos, or accordion-folded books, two of that are fanned out in vitrines. In these items, Adnan’s writing and artwork practices movement into each other.
The feel and strategy of the tapestries additionally summon associations that the work can’t. The weave references the kilims (flat-weave rugs) which are frequent in West Asian international locations, and by extension the thought of residence as each an actual place and an unsettled abstraction for an artist who traversed a number of cultures.
Born in 1925 in Beirut to a Greek Christian mom and Syrian Muslim father, Adnan was multicultural from the beginning — she spoke Greek and Turkish at residence and, like many others in Lebanon, which was below France’s rule till 1943, she discovered French at college. As a younger grownup, she studied philosophy in Paris on the Sorbonne and in the USA on the College of California, Berkeley.
Etel Adnan, “Oasis” (Sixties [2023]), tapestry (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023; photograph © White Dice; photograph by Thomas Lannes)
Communing with the work could be an intimate expertise. Possibly for some it’s due to their small scale and meditative stillness; others could really feel a private reference to the imagery. What number of guests had been raised, like myself, within the diaspora, surrounded by footage and tales of a bygone Lebanon, grown-ups mythologizing the panorama in order that it appeared everlasting to a baby, the sun-bleached buildings and Roman ruins radiating an otherworldly mild?
In late 2022, I visited an exhibition of Adnan’s artwork and writing at Lenbachhaus in Munich that integrated a number of German Expressionist items. The vocabulary of modernism is embedded in her work, not least as a result of it spanned the completely different cultural spheres through which she lived and labored, and the affect of France overlaid the tradition of her Lebanon. However too usually the time period modernism utilized in a Euro-American context to a non-White artist comes with an orientalizing impulse. Lenbachhaus focuses on artwork by German Expressionists, and by the Blue Rider artists particularly, within the metropolis that gave beginning to that group, so a European ambiance pervades the museum. But the projection of European modernism onto Adnan’s aesthetic, which renders her a perpetual outsider even in her personal artwork, just isn’t particular to the Munich present; it’s presupposed at any time when her work is located in relation to Euro-American abstraction.
Etel Adnan. “Untitled” (2015), oil on canvas (photograph Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
On the similar time, an ambiguous sense of place is inscribed in her artwork. She grew up in a primarily Arabic-speaking society with out talking the language at residence, she straddled cultural identities, and her artwork commingles the pure environments of Lebanon and California, two of her longtime properties (together with Paris). From this angle, the quietude of her work is alive with each multiplicity and instability. The suns that seem repeatedly in her work could bear witness to the modifications brought on by people, however even they take completely different kinds; her book-length poem The Arab Apocalypse, printed in 1989 and written throughout the Lebanese Civil Battle (1975–90), opens with myriad suns: “A yellow sun/A green sun/a yellow sun/A red sun/a blue sun.”
A number of extra maintain courtroom on this present. One modest work depicts a sliver of tan sky above a excessive horizon line; beneath, the canvas is split into completely different shades of blue, pierced by a small, pale yellow orb. Although ensconced within the sea, this celestial physique offers heat and light to maintain life, a mirrored image of the light and heat with which Adnan imbued her artwork. Her first poem, she defined in an interview printed within the Paris Evaluation, was “about the marriage of the sun and the sea.” Right here, all seems serene, however it may be misleading. All through The Arab Apocalypse, the solar travels and morphs; it doles out and takes abuses: “The sun has its mouth stitched with barbed wire.”
Then once more, the poem ends, “in the night we shall find knowledge love and peace.”
Etel Adnan, “Untitled” (2014), oil on canvas (photograph Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Etel Adnan: This Stunning Mild at White Dice New York (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025; photograph © White Dice; photograph by Frankie Tyska)
Etel Adnan, “Untitled” (2014), oil on canvas (photograph Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Etel Adnan: This Stunning Mild at White Dice New York. Left: “Untitled” (2003), oil on canvas; proper: “Untitled” (2014), oil on canvas (photograph Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Etel Adnan, “Untitled” (2016), pastel on paper (photograph Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Etel Adnan, “Forêt” (2019), tapestry, version 3 / 3 (photograph Natalie Haddad/Hyperallergic)
Etel Adnan: This Stunning Mild continues at White Dice (1002 Madison Avenue, Higher East Aspect, Manhattan) by March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
