Simone Fattal was thinking of her home city of Damascus when she worked on huge copper structures in the Tazé studio in Paris, thanks to the funding received from LaM (the museum of metropolitan Lille). The first test prints were presented in October 2018, during the “Le monde n’est pas nécessairement un empire” exhibition. These engravings have now been published by Lelong Editions.

The silhouette of a city, some of its monuments, the banks of a river, and soaring trees have been worked with a brush, using sugar-lift aquatint or an acid wash. Printed in black, sepia or blue, the calm assurance of these sensitive and vibrant images, loaded with emotion, generates engagement. These are the first of Simone Fattal’s etchings to be edited.

Born in Damascus, Simone Fattal is a Lebanese-American sculptor, ceramicist and painter who lives and works in Paris. She spent many years in California, where in 1982 she founded ThePost-Apollo Press, which has published many contemporary poets, mainly from America and the Middle East.

A retrospective, Works and Days, at the MoMA PS1 (New York) in 2019, afforded international recognition of her art.

Her works are included in many private and public collections, including most recently the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, when the Friends of the Museum acquired the Guerrier IV glazed sandstone sculpture.