Simone Fattal
MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York
March 31 – September 2, 2019
MoMA PS1 presents the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Simone Fattal (Lebanese and American, b.1942). The retrospective will bring together a selection of over 100 works created over the last 40 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, and collages that draw from a range of sources including war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry. The exhibition will explore the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archeology and excavation, as these themes resonate across Fattal’s multifaceted artistic practice.
SIMONE FATTAL was born in Damascus, Syria and raised in Lebanon, where she studied philosophy at the Ecole des Lettres in Beirut. She then moved to Paris where she continued her philosophical pursuits at the Sorbonne. In 1969, she returned to Beirut and began working as a visual artist, exhibiting her paintings locally until the start of the Lebanese Civil War. She fled Lebanon in 1980 and settled in California, where she founded the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work. In 1988, she enrolled in a course at the Art Institute of San Francisco, which prompted a return to her artistic practice and a newfound dedication to sculpture and ceramics. Simone Fattal currently lives in Paris and has had recent exhibitions at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech (2018), the Rochechouart Departmental Museum of Contemporary Art (2017), and the Sharjah Art Foundation (2016).
Simone Fattal is organized by Ruba Katrib, Curator, MoMA PS1.
Major support for Simone Fattal is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Additional funding is provided by the MoMA PS1 Annual Exhibition Fund.
MoMA PS1
