Artwork Title: Leporello New York

Leporello New York, 1990

Etel Adnan

As one might expect, her poetry and visual works are present throughout in both painting and tapestry form, but there is also the unique fusion of the two in her leporello: accordion folded notebooks that Adnan has used throughout her career. Fattal explains that "the leporello are so understated, quiet, but so powerful when you unfold them. A bit like Etel – they reveal themselves bit by bit." The leporello on show feature a number of poems translated by contemporary Arab poets, accompanied by drawings and expressive blocks of colour, further demonstrating her commitment to communicating in multifarious mediums. (http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/8880/the-exuberant-works-of-artist-etel-adnan) She excels in many media—paintings, tapestries, novels, poems—but the most unique, I think, are her leporellos: accordion-folded booklets of the sort once sold in Victorian England as souvenirs, folding out to reveal panoramic illustrations. Adnan uses them to a variety of ends, often using them as vehicles for unpublished poems and fragments. Some of them are more than six and a half feet long when fully extended; on one of them, she wrote a series of poems in Arabic, a language in which she seldom composes. (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/14/etel-adnans-leporellos/)
Uploaded on Oct 18, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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