Simone Fattal Book Launch

Join us on Friday, February 7 at 7pm to celebrate the release of Simone Fattal's first comprehensive monograph (Portikus / Hatje Cantz, 2024). The artist will be joined in conversation by writer, editor, and curator Negar Azimi to discuss her wide-ranging practice, spanning ceramics, sculpture, painting, collage, and publishing.

Influenced by her first-hand experiences of migration, displacement, and war, Simone Fattal (b. 1942) transcends the bounds of both media and geography like few artists of her generation. Her abstract bronze and ceramic sculptures reference ancient myths and archaeological finds, and her collages combine snippets from her private archive with historical events from the Arab world, reassembling scattered parts to suggest the fragility of an identity shaped by migration.

In 1982, Fattal founded the Post-Apollo Press, issuing Etel Adnan’s chapbook From A to Z as its first title. The Press would go on to publish experimental works of poetry, prose, and translation for over thirty years, amplifying the voices of avant-garde writers from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

Simone Fattal was born in Syria and raised in Lebanon. She was educated in Beirut and Paris, studying archaeology at the École du Louvre and philosophy at the Sorbonne. She returned to Beirut in 1969 where she began her career as an artist, exhibiting her paintings locally through the start of the Lebanese Civil War. She left the city in 1980 and settled in California. Fattal currently lives in Paris, and has exhibited her work in recent exhibitions at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (2024–25); IVAM, Valencia (2024–25); Secession, Vienna (2024); Portikus, Frankfurt (2023); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); and MoMA PS1, New York (2019), among others.

Negar Azimi is a writer and editor and occasional curator. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the publishing and curatorial project Bidoun, a former fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a member of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, and a board member of Artists Space. Her essays, criticism, and reportage have appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Frieze, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and elsewhere. With Pati Hertling she organizes the epistolary series Deadlines and Divine Distractions.