HANS ULRICH OBRIST / Simone Fattal

Hans Ulrich Obrist
Simone Fattal
Texts by Dr. Omar Kholeif, Rasha Salti, 2025
Softcover, 168 pages, 69 color & 33 b/w illustrations
11×16 cm
Sternberg Press (co-published with artPost21)

An intimate biographical journey through five decades of Syrian-Lebanese artist Simone Fattal's groundbreaking practice, from painting to publishing to ceramic sculpture.

For over five decades, Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Damascus) has eschewed singular form or subject in her wide-ranging artistic practice. In this deeply personal biography, Fattal's close friend and confidante Hans Ulrich Obrist journeys with the artist across physical borders and through seats of imagination. Together they discuss the artist's remarkable early life in Syria, her coming-of-age in Lebanon, as well as her transcultural life in France. Wartime memory and exile in California sow the seed for discussions regarding archaeology, history, and mythology.

Beginning her artistic life as a painter in 1969, Fattal initially created 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, Fattal fled the ongoing civil war, departing from painting, eventually settling 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 the creation of ambitious ceramic sculpture—a medium in which she continues to work to this day from her studio in Paris.

Prose and interviews between Fattal and Obrist are annotated and introduced by Dr. Omar Kholeif, whose essay helps situate Fattal's multiple creative journeys. An afterword by author, curator, and filmmaker Rasha Salti, entitled "Warrior Women Fall From a Low Height," pulses with lyricism and an expressive desire to solder and suture histories, once fractious, back together.