Roots Before Petals brings Lana Khayat into dialogue with Etel Adnan and Helen Khal, linking distinct practices across generations of Lebanese artists. Their work differs in scale and sensibility, yet each built an abstract visual language from the natural motif and shared an engagement with the memory of homeland.
The exhibition presents Khayat’s new body of work alongside works by Adnan and Khal from the Olivier Mestelan Pfaehler Collection.
Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a poet, philosopher and visual artist who distilled complex landscape into planes of pure colour. For four decades she returned to the subject of a single mountain, seen from her window in California, a place observed directly that became a surface for questions of distance and belonging. Helen Khal (1923–2009) remained anchored to the physical world, the flower and land being among the vessels into which she poured colour and feeling as her work moved towards abstraction. Writing from abroad, she found her colour suffering from the absence of “that special light of Lebanon”.
Lana Khayat’s (b. 1983) Dessine-moi un pays, le Liban (Draw me a country, Lebanon) extends this dialogue. Across 5 paintings, her botanical abstraction transforms the flower from image into environment, and Lebanon emerges as an emotional floral landscape. Her work continues beyond the canvas into three-dimensional flowers set across a carpet of grass, turning the gallery into a garden the visitor can physically enter.
Adnan and Khal have long been among the artists Khayat admires. Their work established a lineage that Khayat continues in her own voice. Roots Before Petals acknowledges this artistic inheritance, recognizing that nothing blooms without first taking root.
