Simone FattalCities at the Bottom of a Lake

In fall 2026, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is devoting a major exhibition to Simone Fattal, a Lebanese American artist born in Damas in 1942 and based in Paris for many years.

Bringing together some one hundred works, the exhibition covers over fifty years of her artistic trajectory—from early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages. Organized into successive groupings rather than chronologically, the exhibition sequence invites visitors to explore the key themes of a constantly renewed diverse body of work.

Enthralled with literature and archeology, Simone Fattal initially studied philosophy at the School of Letters in Beirut, then at the Sorbonne, complementing her training with classes at the École du Louvre.

In the late 1960s, it was in Beirut that she took up painting, endlessly depicting trees, the seaside and mountains, and pushing the limits of figuration. In 1972, she met the Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan (1925-2021), with whom she shared nearly fifty years of life and complicity. Forced to leave Lebanon in 1980 because of the civil war, Simone Fattal moved to Sausalito, California, north of San Francisco Bay. She temporarily gave up painting to devote herself fully to founding The Post-Apollo Press publishing house (1982-2017), whose name was inspired by the Apollo space program that she perceived as the beginning of a new era in the history of humanity.

In 1988 she began a ceramics practice after taking classes at the College of Marin and the San Francisco Art Institute. Out of clay emerged archaic anthropomorphic or animal figures that drew inspiration from the mythological epics of the Mediterranean Bassin, especially Mesopotamia or Ancient Greece, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Iliad and The Odyssey.

The 2010s were witness to the end of The Post-Apollo Press publishing venture and her definitive return to Paris. In tandem with sculptures and collages of personal and collective stories, landscape painting made a comeback. Executed with quick strokes, colorful watercolors and black ink drawings of plant motifs expressed her vision of nature animated by a boundless vital force.

This exhibition, the first at a Parisian museum, pays tribute to a major artist who is internationally renowned yet has seldom been shown in France. 

A catalogue created in close collaboration with Simone Fattal complements the exhibition.
Minimalist in its design, the monograph reproduces a large array of the works on view. Along with this abundant iconography, the catalogue features new texts, notably a contribution by Penelope Curtis, former director of the Tate Britain, as well as a text and a biography by the artist herself.
Blending critical rigor and an intimate viewpoint, this book highlights visual artist, author, and publisher Simone Fattal’s multifaceted creativity.