Autumn in Yosemite Valley

Born 1925, Beirut · Died 2021, Paris
For the past half century, Adnan has offered insights into a multiplicity of subjects in her paintings, essays, and poems, in which love, language, and war are recurring themes. While growing up in Beirut, she was immersed in a medley of languages, including Greek, Turkish, Arabic, and French, yielding an unusual linguistic aptitude. After studying philosophy at the Université de Paris–Sorbonne, where she composed her first poems in French, Adnan pursued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University. Abandoning the use of French as a protest against France’s hostilities in Algeria, she changed her focus to the visual arts. Her abstract paintings, largely created with a palette knife, reveal her abiding interest in color. Recently, her visual art has attracted greater attention: in 2012 her paintings were included in Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, and in 2014 the Whitney Biennial in New York featured some of her tapestries and paintings. A 2014 retrospective took place at Mathaf (Arab Museum of Modern Art) in Doha, Qatar, and in 2018 MASS MoCA organized a survey in North Adams, Massachusetts. Adnan lives in Paris, France, with her partner, Simone Fattal. A biography of the artist by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie was published in 2018.
This painting, titled Autumn in Yosemite Valley, was created during Adnan’s stay in California in the 1960s. Through vibrant colours, the artist offers a personal interpretation of the region’s landscape, capturing both its natural beauty and its emotional resonance.