Simone Fattal, Memory in Clay

Some artists develop their work along a clearly recognisable trajectory, while others build it through layers, allowing different times and places to coexist. Simone Fattal belongs to the latter. From September 2026 to January 2027, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris presents her first major exhibition in a Paris museum. Born in Damascus and shaped by life in Beirut, California and Paris, Fattal has spent more than fifty years moving between painting, ceramics, collage and publishing, creating a body of work in which memory, myth and the present are in constant dialogue. Bringing together around one hundred works, the exhibition portrays an artist who resists easy categorisation. After studying philosophy and completing her education at the École du Louvre, Fattal began painting the landscapes of Lebanon in the late 1960s. The outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War forced her to leave Beirut in 1980 and settle in California, where she founded the independent publishing house The Post-Apollo Press. For more than three decades she published poetry, philosophy and literature, revealing how closely words and images have always been connected in her practice. When she returned fully to making art, she turned to clay. Her ceramics gave shape to warriors, deities and austere figures inspired by the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. Gilgamesh, Ishtar, Dionysus and Odysseus are not archaeological references but living presences that speak to the contemporary world. War, exile and loss quietly run through her work: the warriors become symbols of resilience, while her terracotta architectural forms, inspired by Mesopotamian ziggurats and Greek temples, evoke both ancient ruins and cities devastated by modern conflicts. Alongside the sculptures, the exhibition includes collages, watercolours and paintings in which landscape returns as a place of memory. Trees, mountains, clouds and rivers coexist with images of migration and the consequences of war, forming a body of work where archaeology, literature and nature are not separate realms but different ways of interpreting the present through a perspective that reaches far beyond individual experience.