Hans Ulrich Obrist leads readers into the world of path-breaking Syrian artist Simone Fattal in this intensely personal volume.

For over five decades, Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus) has eschewed any singular form or subject in her wide-ranging practice. In this deeply personal volume, Fattal’s close friend and confidante Hans Ulrich Obrist delves into the artist’s past to explore the remarkable breadth of her body of work.

After studying philosophy, first in Beirut and then Paris, Fattal returned to Beirut in 1969 and began life as a painter-creating sensuous abstract works that diverged from the predominantly figurative paintings commonly exhibited in Lebanon at the time. In 1980, after a decade spent in Lebanon as a painter, Fattal fled the civil war, abandoned her painting practice, and settled in Sausalito, California, where she founded the revolutionary publishing house Post-Apollo Press. In 1988, after studying sculpture in San Francisco, Fattal was consumed by another wave of creativity that led her to pursue ceramic sculptures-a medium in which she continues to work to this day from her studio in Paris.

Alongside prose and interviews with Fattal by Obrist, a foreword by Dr. Omar Kholeif situates Fattal’s early practice in the broader schema of art to emerge in West Asia, while an afterword by Rasha Salti delves into the influence of European and Arabic mythology on Fattal’s artmaking.

Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21