NEW YORK, NY.- Time itself becomes pliant in the hands of Simone Fattal, who has spent six decades forging a singular project to bridge the ancient and modern. This joint presentation spans two linked exhibitions — The Primeval Forest, at Greene Naftali, and The Hearth, at kaufmann repetto — and marks the artist’s return to New York following her acclaimed 2019 survey at MoMA PS1. The works on view range from sculptures in clay, stoneware, and bronze to large-scale drawings and cut-paper collage, implying a ritual landscape suffused with belief in what can’t be seen.

Born in Damascus in 1942, Fattal was raised in Lebanon and educated in Beirut and Paris, where she studied archaeology at the École du Louvre and philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1969 she returned to Beirut, where she began her career as an artist, exhibiting her paintings locally through the start of the Lebanese Civil War. She left the city in1980 and resettled in California. There she founded the Post-Apollo Press to publish avant-garde authors from around the world. By 1988 Fattal had resumed her visual art, enrolling at the San Francisco Art Institute where she discovered ceramics, coaxing a near-animistic quality from the supple medium of clay. Fattal eventually returned to Paris where she still resides, making a body of work informed by poetry and myth that views the deep past through living eyes.

Known primarily as a sculptor of totemic works in clay and bronze, Fattal makes use of motifs that imply a cultural mix—from Sumerian tales to Sufi mysticism and pre-Islamic lore—that mirrors her own itinerant life, tapping into shared narratives of displacement and human resilience. Peopled with rough-hewn figures, architectural fragments, and scenes from the natural world, the exhibitions depict elemental forces and our means of shelter from them: the fundamental drive to make a home, and to preserve what might otherwise be lost.

Simone Fattal lives and works in Paris. A major solo exhibition dedicated to her work will open at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in September 2026. Recent solo exhibitions and public commissions include Musée du Louvre, Paris (2024–25); IVAM, Valencia (2024–25); Secession, Vienna (2024); Portikus, Frankfurt (2023); National Museum of Qatar, Doha (2022–ongoing); Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); ICA Milano, Milan (2021); and MoMA PS1, New York (2019). Significant group exhibitions include Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, Berkeley Art Museum / Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, St. Louis (2024–2026); the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025); the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2022); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2022); 12th Berlin Biennale (2022); 16th Biennale de Lyon, France (2022); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2021); Punta Della Dogana, Pinault Collection, Venice (2019); New Museum, New York (2014); and Sharjah Biennial (2011).

Her work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; National Museum of Qatar, Doha; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; mumok, Vienna; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech; Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.