Once I was asked in front of a television camera: “Who is the most important person you ever met?” and I remember answering: “A mountain.” I thus discovered that Tamalpais was at the very center of my being.

- E. ADNAN, JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS, THE POST-APOLLO PRESS, SAUSALITO, 1986.

Mount Tamalpais, which Adnan could see from her window in Sausalito, was a subject to which the artist would return to on many occasions and over numerous decades. It became an immutable reference point which she drew and recreated incessantly, capturing its moods and seasons. As her long-time partner Simone Fattal has said of her practice, Adnan doesn’t depict a mountain, a landscape, a city or place as it appears one time, on one day. She captures its multiplicity, at all times, in one work - the image as it will always be, as well as how it appears in that one moment.

In the present example, the mountain is seen under a bright blue sky and emerges from contrasting surfaces of pigment in varying shapes and tones. The artist’s favored tool, the palette knife, is clearly visible through the movement of the thick paint across the surface of the canvas which she laid flat on a table. It is at once a representation of the mountain which she could see from her living room where she worked, but also a landscape of memory.

- ETEL ADNAN CITED IN: HANS ULRICH OLBRIST, 'ETEL ADNAN. STORIES', MAHARAM, ONLINE.

Known predominantly throughout her life as an established writer and literary critic, her talent as a visual artist was revealed in the 2012 edition of Documenta in Kassel, in which her works created a sensation. A number of career surveys and retrospectives followed at museums such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2015), Serpentine Gallery, London (2016), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2018-19), the Pera Museum, Istanbul (2021) and most recently at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (8 October 2021-10 January 2022).