kaufmann repetto new york is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Simone Fattal. The exhibition marks the artist’s second presentation with the gallery following a recent exhibition in Milano, and the artist’s first solo project in New York.

Simone Fattal’s sculptures continuously call forth timeless conversations of the innate, the organic, and the spiritual tendencies towards creativity and of creation. As if working from a collective muscle memory, beckoned by the very first beings and eternalized by each individual, her works seem to breathe with the very air and earth of our ancestors.

The simultaneously slab-like and totemic forms feel both regal and divine but also human. They speak to us not via realistic nor abstracted interpretations but through their emotive essence. They are life-like not in their rendering of human form but in their evidence of what it means to be alive.

These impressions with which the works are imbued, physically and emotively, may be best understood through Fattal’s material gravitation itself. Clay, after all, is created by and composed of the Earth. Clay is also the allegorical material of which man was mythically made. It is colloquially understood as both the body, distinguished from the soul, and a measurement of character as compared to those more supernal entities. It is within this intersection and unison – of the body, the soul, and the divine – that Simone Fattal’s works seem to so powerfully linger.

Simone Fattal was born in Damascus, Syria and grew up in Lebanon. She studied philosophy at the Ecole des Letters of Beirut and at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1980, fleeing the Syrian Civil War, she settled in California and founded the PostApollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work. She returned to her career as an artist in 1988 through the medium of ceramics. Fattal recently took part in the renowned show featuring contemporary art from and about the Arab world at the New Museum, entitled Here and Elsewhere, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. Other recent shows include solo exhibitions with kaufmann repetto Milano (2016); Sharja Art Foundation, Sharja (2016); Nel Mezzo del Mezzo at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Palermo, Sicily (2016); and Take me, I’m yours curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Chiara Parisi at the Monnaie in Paris (2015).