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Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 1
Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 2
Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 3
Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 4
Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 5
Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 6
Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 7
Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021) Belles Creatures image 8
Lot 16*

Etel Adnan
(Lebanon, 1925-2021)
Belles Creatures

25 November 2025, 14:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£60,000 - £80,000

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Etel Adnan (Lebanon, 1925-2021)

Belles Creatures
mixed media on paper, leporello
signed "Etel Adnan" and dated "05-1988" in Arabic and English on the front cover, executed in 1988
24.5 x 540cm (9 5/8 x 212 5/8in).

Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Lebanon
Acquired by the above from Claude Lemand Gallery, Paris

"My first published book in 1969 'The Beautiful Creatures Of Fadhil al-Azzawi' was a text in which I tried to unite different genres in one form. This was something new in modern Arabic literature, but it was not totally without roots in classical Arab literature. In most of the ancient prose texts, the authors mix lyrics with prose; in some cases, they even let their characters converse with one another in poetry."
- Fadhil Al Azzawi

Beautiful Creatures is Fadhil Al-Azzawi's genre-defying epic in prose. Divided into 78 cantos and narrated by a solitary traveller, it blends surreal, dark humour and poetic fragments as it weaves through memory, political trauma, exile, and the interior terrains of a fractured world. Rather than a conventional plot, the text operates as a shifting mosaic, where language, myth, image, and voice intermingle - a daring meditation on freedom, identity, and the possibilities of art under constraint

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