Simone Fattal exhibition at MAM Paris: myths, exile and submerged cities

The Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris hosts an exhibition dedicated to Simone Fattal with From Cities at the Bottom of a Lake, on view in the 16th arrondissement of Paris from September 18, 2026 to January 24, 2027. It offers a survey of the Lebanese-American artist's career through about a hundred works—paintings, ceramics, and collages—marking her first monographic exhibition at a Paris museum.

Born in Damascus in 1942 and long-established in Paris, Simone Fattal has built a body of work shaped by literature, archaeology, mythology, and history. After studying philosophy in Beirut and at the Sorbonne, with additional coursework at the École du Louvre, she began painting in the late 1960s in Lebanon, then paused this practice during her exile in the United States in 1980. She went on to found the publishing house The Post-Apollo Press, dedicated to poetry and experimental texts, before returning to visual creation in the early 1990s, notably through ceramics.

• To be read
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The exhibition journey brings together more than fifty years of work without following a strict chronological order. The pieces are grouped by theme to juxtapose the different periods and techniques the artist explored. The early landscape paintings converse with ceramic sculptures, collages that blend personal narratives with collective memory, and watercolors and inks created during the artist’s return to Paris. A selection of works published by The Post-Apollo Press rounds out the presentation, underscoring the importance of the artist’s editorial activity within the arc of their career.

With Des villes au fond d’un lac, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris offers a cross-cutting reading of Simone Fattal's work, letting media, cultural references, and the different phases of her career speak to one another. This retrospective thus helps readers gain a fuller sense of an artist whose creations draw as much from landscapes as from storytelling, myths, and ancient civilizations.

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