UNTITLED
signed marwan upper right; signed and dated marwan 2007 on the reverse
watercolour on paper
28.5 x 21cm; 11 1/4 x 8 1/4in
unframed

Property of a Lady, Berkshire

Provenance
Hadba Nizar Kabbani (acquired from the artist)
Thence by descent to the present owner

The late Syrian-German artist Marwan Kassab-Bachi, known by his first name Marwan, has been attracting attention from German and Middle Eastern institutions for many years, who were drawn to his expressive figurative paintings, etchings, and works on paper.

Internationally, his work was featured in the 57^th Venice Biennale in 2017 in Christine Marcel’s The Pavilion of Joys and Fears, as well as the exhibition of the Sharjah based Barjeel Foundation’s collection at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 2016. His career has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Mosaic Rooms in London in 2015, and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal in 2014 (curated by Catherine David). He has two works in Tate Modern's collection as well as featuring in the collections of the British Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Born in Damascus into a wealthy family, Marwan studied Arabic literature at Damascus University from 1955 to 1957. Already an amateur painter he, like many of his contemporaries, was curious to explore European literary and artistic culture. In 1957 he travelled to Paris with the purpose of engaging with the existentialist intelligentsia of the city, but almost by chance, ended up instead in Berlin. Here he studied painting under Hann Trier at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. His fellow students at the time were Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck and for a few years, these three painters were close friends and experimenters. Together they liberated their painting from the tragedy of the post war period and instead rediscovered the potency of the human figure. It was this obsession with the human figure which was to last throughout the rest of Marwan’s life.

From the early 70s his focus shifted and narrowed into depicting more intimate human heads – his inner self-portrait. In 1973 Marwan achieved his life-long ambition and lived for a year in Paris on a scholarship from the Cité des Arts. It was at this time that his distinctive splashily deconstructed style also emerged. Still engaged almost exclusively with figuration, his obsession with self-portrait heads became augmented in the 1980’s with a marionette he was given, which became his trusted model.

The complexity behind these later compositions is exemplified by the artist's technique. He applies layer after layer with great patience and intensity - which acts metaphorically to highlight the multi-layered human psyche. Simultaneously portraying proximity and distance, as one moves closer to the image, it gradually blurs, morphing into a shimmering radiant field of colour that offers an exemplary insight into the inner workings of Marwan's mind.

Oscillating between ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’, political and spiritual, his deeply personal focus on the human figure for him became a way of expressing the dramatic depth of life and consequently a universal message for all humanity.