Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to announce that Etel Adnan and Zilia Sánchez have been invited to the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa. The exhibition will take place from April 20 to November 24, 2024.

The 60th International Art Exhibition will take place from Saturday 20 April to Sunday 24 November, 2024 (pre-opening on April 17, 18 and 19), curated by Adriano Pedrosa. “I am honored and humbled by this prestigious appointment, especially as the first Latin American to curate the International Art Exhibition, and in fact the first one based in the Southern Hemisphere”, Pedrosa commented.

Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil) is currently the artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP, where he has curated many exhibitions, including Histories of Dance (2020) and Brazilian Histories (2022). He has recently been appointed the 2023 recipient of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, that was presented to him by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York.

Etel Adnan’s career spanned several decades and encompassed a wide range of media—including painting, drawing, tapestry, film, ceramics, and leporello artist books—as it did traditions and locations. Adnan was first an author of poetry and prose, often addressing and protesting against the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the Lebanese Civil War. Informing her writing and later her artwork as well, was the landscape, its own history and her emotional and physical response to it. For Adnan, the landscape is mingled with memory, especially a sentiment of displacement, as she was born and raised in Lebanon, but lived, studied, and worked in France and California throughout her life.

In 2012, Adnan was included in Documenta (13) in Germany. Since then, numerous museums have presented solo exhibitions of the artist’s work, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2021); Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City (2019); Aspen Museum of Art, Aspen, Colorado (2019); SFMoMA, California (2018); Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland (2018); MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2018); Institute du Monde Arabe, France (2017); the Serpentine Gallery, England (2016); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Switzerland (2016); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland (2015); Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2014-2015); and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar (2014). Adnan’s work is included in major public collections such as the British Museum, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Institut du Monde Arabe, France; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; M+, Hong Kong, China; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Tunisia; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925. She died in Paris, France in 2021.

Zilia Sánchez’s work is characterized by her distinctive approach to formal abstraction through the use of undulating silhouettes, a muted color palette, and a unique, sensual vocabulary. She is primarily recognized for her shaped canvases, first created in Havana in the 1950s and further developed while living in Havana, New York City, and Madrid. Sánchez’s signature style consists of stretching canvas over hand-molded wooden armatures and painting them with acrylic. Over her 65-year career, Sánchez has explored the juxtapositions between the feminine and the masculine, the painterly and the sculptural, the personal and the universal, the exterior body and the interior self. The reduced color palettes in her compositions, as well as the serial processes she employs, connect her to Minimalism, though the sensuality and embrace of the curve in her work bear witness to the distinctive language Sánchez has developed.

This is Zilia Sánchez's second invitation to the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia; in 2017, her work was included in the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel.

In April 2024, a solo exhibition by Sánchez, Topologías / Topologies, will be presented at ICA Miami, Florida.

In 2019, Soy Isla, a major solo exhibition of Sánchez’s work, was presented at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and toured to Museo de Arte Ponce, San Juan, Puerto Rico and El Museo del Barrio, New York, New York. In 2019, Galerie Lelong & Co. presented its second solo exhibition of the artist’s work, Eros. Sánchez’s work is featured in public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Pérez Art Muesum, Miami; Colby College Museum of Art, Maine; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and Walker Art Center, Minnesota.

Sánchez was born in 1926 in Havana, Cuba. The artist lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she permanently settled in the­ early 1970s.

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