Simone Fattal

Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus, Syria) was raised in Lebanon, where she studied philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut before continuing her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969, she returned to Beirut and began her artistic practice as a painter, producing landscapes and abstract works and exhibiting extensively in Lebanon until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. In 1980, she left Lebanon and settled in California, where she founded Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work. She returned to visual art in 1988, beginning a sustained engagement with sculpture and ceramics after studying at the Art Institute of San Francisco. Fattal’s practice encompasses sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, and collage. Her ceramic sculptures often take the form of archaic anthropomorphic and animal figures, drawing on mythology, archaeology, and literary traditions from the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. References to works such as the *Epic of Gilgamesh*, *The Iliad*, and *The Odyssey*, as well as to historical and mythological figures, are reworked through simplified and highly individual forms. Alongside these sculptures, Fattal has continued to produce paintings and works on paper, including landscapes and plant motifs. The relationship between memory, displacement, mythology, and history is central to Fattal’s work. Her experience of migration—from Damascus to Lebanon, Paris, California, and ultimately Paris again—has informed a practice in which personal and collective histories intersect with ancient narratives and archaeological forms. Her collages similarly bring together fragments and images from different sources, creating relationships between private memory and broader historical events. Across these different media, Fattal approaches the past not as a fixed chronology but as a field of images, stories, and forms that can be continuously reinterpreted. Alongside her artistic practice, Fattal maintained a significant engagement with literature and publishing. Through Post-Apollo Press, which she founded in California in 1982, she published experimental and innovative literary works by a wide range of writers and artists. Since 2006, she has also produced her ceramic works at Hans Spinner’s workshop in Grasse, France. Her film *Autoportrait*, released in 2013, has been presented at international film festivals. Fattal currently lives and works in Paris. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including MoMA PS1 in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Sharjah Art Foundation, the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, Portikus in Frankfurt, Ocean Space in Venice, KINDL in Berlin, Secession in Vienna, and the IVAM in Valencia. In 2024, she was the subject of exhibitions at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Secession, and IVAM, while in 2025 she was awarded the Prix International d’Art Contemporain of the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. Her work is held in major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Sharjah Art Foundation.