It’s not unusual for artists to have their moment after death, but to have their moment at the moment of death? This is the case for Etel Adnan, the inspiring artist-writer who died this winter at the age of 96. As her audience, many of us are just beginning to uncover her richly productive career, which spanned several decades and embodied a wide range of media, including paintings, drawings, films, tapestries, prose, poetry, and accordion-fold art books. She worked quietly and prolifically across continents and languages.
It is surprising that Adnan’s visual art, until recently, has been largely overlooked; the art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist praises her as “one of the most influential artists of the 21st century.” That attention has landed with her current Guggenheim Museum exhibition, “Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure,” closing January 10, and two Galerie Lelong & Co. exhibitions (on view simultaneously at their New York City and Paris galleries, starting this month). The Lelong exhibitions, both titled “Discovery of Immediacy,” feature Adnan’s monochromatic still-life paintings.
