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For the last five decades, Simone Fattal has produced works that refract the particularities of the present vis-à-vis a careful consideration of the past ‘History is a continuous movement,’ the artist has said in a recent interview; one that ‘is made every day,’ as she notes in another[1] As aesthetic concerns in their own right, rather than mere source material, history and archaeology offer for Fattal modes of engaging form and politics with an indelible tenderness – a quality that defines the artist’s oeuvre   Born in Damascus in 1942, Simone Fattal was educated in Beirut and Paris, where she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne Upon returning to Beirut in 1969, she embarked on a career as a painter alongside contemporaries such as Etel Adnan, her collaborator and long-time partner with whom she still lives With Adnan, Fattal fled Lebanon in 1980, during the nation’s civil war, settling in northern California and founding the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house for experimental literature Returning to visual art in 1988, Fattal began to make ceramic sculptures, and in the past decade has also made watercolours, paintings, and collage works   WORKS AND DAYS (2019), the first solo exhibition dedicated to Fattal in the United States, gathers several hundred of these works across various mediums in a smartly arranged retrospective that sheds light on the artist’s expansive interests in such topics as Sufi mysticism, mythology, and the geopolitics of the Arab world The artist draws from these themes to produce the ‘characters’ of her figurative ceramic sculptures, which include epic heroes such as Gilgamesh and Ulysses, alongside anonymous stock characters such as warriors, and standing or seated men and women Neatly grouped together on white plinths, these sculptures are rarely more than a meter high, and are displayed alongside Fattal’s abstract landscapes hung on the gallery’s walls, producing effective visual links between her practices As with her sculptural practice, Fattal’s approach to landscape is highly gestural, effacing the particulars of place while simultaneously indexing the artist’s hand While the title of the painting LE MONT SANNINE (1979) references the mountain that Fattal could