Simone Fattal

Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus, Syria) is a Lebanese-Syrian artist and publisher who lives and works in Paris. Raised in Lebanon, she studied philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She returned to Beirut in 1969 and began working as a painter, exhibiting her work until the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. In 1980 she fled the city and settled in Sausalito, California, where she founded Post-Apollo Press — a publishing house dedicated to poetry, experimental writing, and translation — and published, among other works, Etel Adnan's novel Sitt Marie Rose (1978). Adnan, artist and poet, became her partner and lifelong collaborator until Adnan's death in 2021.

In 1988 she returned to art-making by enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she discovered ceramics and sculpture. Her practice — drawing on ancient Near Eastern antiquities, Sufi poetry, Mediterranean mythology, and the landscapes of displacement — produces sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and clay whose forms are pared down to their most elemental while bearing the visible traces of the artist's hand. Since 2006 she has worked in Hans Spinner's ceramic workshop in Grasse, France. Her work engages the body as fragment, the standing figure as monument and survivor, and the intersection of archaeological and personal memory.

Her first major US museum retrospective, Simone Fattal: Works and Days, was presented at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2019. Her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022, The Milk of Dreams) and the 60th Venice Biennale (2024, Holy See Pavilion). Recent solo exhibitions include KINDL in Berlin, Portikus in Frankfurt, and a presentation at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles (2025–26).