Simone Fattal

Artist, Translator

Simone Fattal contributor photo, indoors in front of painting with a red half-circle

Simone Fattal was born in Damascus, Syria, and raised in Lebanon, where she studied philosophy at the École 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. Fattal currently lives in Paris, and she 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). In 2019, MoMA PS1 presented the retrospective Works and Days, Fattal’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

From Our Catalog

Voyage, War, Exile: Three Essays
By Etel Adnan
Mum is Down
By Oscarine Bosquet
Translated By Cole Swensen, Simone Fattal
Winter
By Eugénie Paultre
Translated By Cole Swensen, Simone Fattal, Etel Adnan
Rûmî and Sufism
By Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch
Translated By Simone Fattal

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