“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 area unfurls on a wall-sized grid of ceramic tiles. Among the many uneven washes of inexperienced are blocks of major colours and a multicolored form thrusting diagonally throughout the image aircraft, 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 types, 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 gentle; in one other, blocks of coloration recommend an inside with an indirect view of a window. In practically all, the photographs 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 types. Though some resemble landscapes, as within the tree-like “Figues” (2021) and “Oasis” (Sixties), with its abstracted cacti and blazing pink solar towards a pink 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 circulate 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 can be widespread in West Asian nations, and by extension the concept of house 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 house and, like many others in Lebanon, which was underneath France’s rule till 1943, she discovered French in school. As a younger grownup, she studied philosophy in Paris on the Sorbonne and in the US 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. Perhaps for some it’s due to their small scale and meditative stillness; others might 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 toddler, the sun-bleached buildings and Roman ruins radiating an otherworldly gentle?
In late 2022, I visited an exhibition of Adnan’s artwork and writing at Lenbachhaus in Munich that included just a few German Expressionist items. The vocabulary of modernism is embedded in her work, not least as a result of it spanned the totally 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 makes a speciality of artwork by German Expressionists, and by the Blue Rider artists particularly, within the metropolis that gave beginning to that group, so a European environment pervades the museum. But the projection of European modernism onto Adnan’s aesthetic, which renders her a perpetual outsider even in her personal artwork, is just not 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 identical 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 house, 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 attitude, the quietude of her work is alive with each multiplicity and instability. The suns that seem repeatedly in her work might bear witness to the modifications brought on by people, however even they take totally different types; her book-length poem The Arab Apocalypse, printed in 1989 and written in the course of the Lebanese Civil Warfare (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; under, the canvas is split into totally different shades of blue, pierced by a small, pale yellow orb. Although ensconced within the sea, this celestial physique gives heat and light to maintain life, a mirrored image of the heat and light with which Adnan imbued her artwork. Her first poem, she defined in an interview printed within the Paris Evaluate, 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.