Simone Fattal b. 1942

Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus, Syria) lives and works in Paris. Through her work in sculpture, painting, watercolor, and collage, Fattal translates the cross-cultural experience of her life into a universal narrative of humankind.
Born in Damascus and raised in Beirut, Fattal studied philosophy first at the École des Lettres in Beirut, later at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969 she returned to Beirut where she took up painting, inspired by her artistic friends. During the Lebanese Civil war she found refuge in Sausalito, California, where she started Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literature. It was there where she discovered ceramics and started exploring her sculptural work which would later become seminal in her oeuvre. On a formal level her sculptures, made of ceramic, bronze, clay or porcelain, often are pared down to their most essential, appearing minimalist while bearing the traces of the artist’s hand.
Her artistic alphabet is made up of organic shapes, humans and trees alongside architectural forms and household objects and are being repeated in manifold variations. These works have an ageless quality to them and are hard to place in time. Their inspiration is drawn from mythology and literature, from religious tales to the artist’s nostalgia for her homeland Syria. Not unlike an archeologist, Fattal explores the memory of a place she will never see again and yet it’s culture can be carried forward.