Etel Adnan, The Weight of the World 1-20, 2016

Colour is an elemental force in the compositions of this Lebanese-American artist, who is also celebrated internationally as a poet and writer. Adnan’s intensely sensorial paintings, tapestries and verse are largely inspired by the natural world, as well as by her cultural experiences of childhood in a multilingual milieu and peripatetic life as an adult, moving between Beirut, Paris and  Sausalito, California. For Adnan, images are pure feeling. Her early abstract paintings evoked landscapes using geometric blocks of colour, often anchored around a red square. On moving to Sausalito in the 1970S, she became fascinated with Mount Tamalpais, capturing its every mood in a patchwork of hues, as Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) had done for Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence. The work seen here distils composition itself into colour and form. Twenty compact canvases each feature a large disc floating above other shapes in a play of hues, suggestive of seas or mountains perhaps. While the title brings to mind the emotional impact of political conflict, which Adnan has protested in her writings, these joyful paintings - executed by the artist at the age of ninety-one - exude lightness and sheer energy.

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