Artist Simone Fattal has opened her first major commission in a UK art gallery. The show, named finding a Way, at Whitechapel Gallery in London, includes works that span several years, and is intended to be understood as one piece in a reflection on conflict and history, Fattal says. Staging and scenography are crucial to the work. Fattal has organised the ceramics and works on paper down a central aisle, in which five standing figures appear almost to be walking away from the viewer as he or she enters the room. Four are made in clay, the material with which Fattal has worked for decades.
The Master, a bulbous, friendly-looking fellow, is cast in bronze, with a dark patina covering his bumps and bulges – a recasting of a favourite sculpture of Fattal’s from 1989, which broke apart in its original clay form. Fattal’s work bats between epic references and opacity, as if she wants to leave space for the viewer to make his or her own judgments about the pieces. Contrast structures the entire exhibition: the calm, classical layout with its main axis, balanced by low-slung works hugging the horizon on either side. Or the luxuriant amorphousness of the clay and its tactile, handworked feel, versus the specific grounding references of Gilgamesh, ziggurats, and the Syrian souqs.
She describes her ceramics as “haunted” by her memories of Syria – “When you leave somewhere at a young age, you memorialise it,” she says – but their luminous coloured glazes evoke California, almost as an index of Fattal’s own peregrinations. Fattal was born in Damascus in 1942, grew up in Beirut and then studied philosophy in Zurich. She returned to Beirut to work as a painter, and moved to California in 1980.There, she founded The Post-Apollo Press, an important imprint for radical publishing, and took up making the ceramics for which she is best known.
“When I arrived in California, I did not do any paintings,” she recalls. “We were in such a beautiful landscape in Marin County – just stupendously beautiful. I had nothing to add to it. So I started then doing sculpture, and in sculpture came up all the memories of archaeology, heroes and history.”