Marwan: Various Works (1965–2008)

Overview

Marwan Kassab Bachi, most commonly known as MARWAN, was a pioneering painter and educator, whose life and work bridged continents and cultures. Loosely situated within the context of the New Figuration movement, the 1960s revival of figurative painting that followed post-war abstraction in Europe and America, MARWAN’s work also bears the influence of his studies in Arabic literature at Damascus University, where he was exposed to Sufi philosophy. He moved to Berlin in the late 1950s and enrolled in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Berlin, where he later served as full professor from 1980 to 2002. The artist achieved acclaim in Germany, becoming the first Arab member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1994, and he was also a major influence on a generation of artists in the Middle East, serving as director of Darat al Funun’s Summer Academy in Amman from 1999 to 2003.

The SB14 platform Making New Time brings together six of MARWAN’s paintings from 1965 to 2010, encompassing expressive portraits as well as paintings of the outsized heads and faces for which he is best known. These works traverse a history of portraiture, the discombobulated heads, distorted bodies and elements of caricature and surrealism placing his work in dialogue with a compositional genealogy that could be said to extend from ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman art to the tight close-ups of today’s digital works. For MARWAN, the face was the most expressive of all sites, becoming in his hands an affective landscape capable of conveying the vast terrain of human interiority through subtle gradients of colour and tone.