Simone Fattal. Des Villes au fond d'un Lac

Ticket valid for 15 minutes, untimed visit.

Free for under-18s, jobseekers, and recipients of social security benefits.

Important: reduced rates are only available at the museum ticket counters.

The museum is closed on Mondays, December 25th, and January 1st.

Simone Fattal

Des Villes au fond d'un Lac

From September 18, 2026 to January 24, 2027

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is devoting a major retrospective to Simone Fattal, a Lebanese-American artist born in Damascus in 1942 who has lived in Paris for many years. A tireless explorer of materials and techniques, Simone Fattal creates a multifaceted body of work nourished by a wide range of literary, mythological, and historical sources.

Her rich journey is deeply rooted in the Near East. It was in Beirut that she first took up painting, inspired by the landscapes. Forced to leave Lebanon in 1980 due to the war, she settled in Sausalito near San Francisco with her partner, the artist and poet Etel Adnan (1925-2021). Simone Fattal temporarily abandoned painting to focus on founding Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to poetry and experimental texts, primarily feminist ones.

Then, at the turn of the 1990s, she began working with ceramics. Her archaic, anthropomorphic, and animal figures draw inspiration from the mythological tales of the Mediterranean basin.

Alongside sculpture and collage, painting reappeared in the 2010s, accompanied by works on paper: colorful watercolors and black inks inspired by calligraphy or nature.

This first exhibition in a Paris museum pays tribute to a singular artist and true free spirit, bearing witness to the richness and scale of a creation that is ever in motion.