Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was a painter, poet and essayist, and more broadly, an iconic figure of the early 21st century. Born in Beirut in a multiethnic and multicultural family, she grew up speaking Arabic, Greek and Turkish and studied in a Francophone religious school. She travelled to Paris, where she obtained a degree in philosophy before pursuing her curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. Adnan returned to Beirut and developed a writing practice through newspaper articles. After the start of the war in Lebanon, she published the novel Sitt Marie-Rose and the poem The Arab Apocalypse. In parallel, she constructed a corpus of visual works composed of paintings, drawings, foldable leporellos and tapestries.

Etel Adnan gained worldwide recognition after participating in Documenta 13, Kassel in 2012, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Since then, her work has been included in the most prestigious collections and museums. In 2021, Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure was shown at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and in 2022, Colour as Language at Van Gogh Museum was her first retrospective in the Netherlands.

This drawing depicts three pots of flowers in front of a mountain. The mountain is a recurrent motif in the œuvre of Etel Adnan, who had a very special relationship with Mount Tamalpais in California, probably depicted here. In a book entitled Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Adnan wrote: “Once I was asked in front of a television camera: “Who is the most important person you ever met?” and I remember answering: “A mountain.” I thus discovered that Tamalpais was at the very centre of my being.”