Marwan Kassab-Bachi (b. 1934, Damascus, Syria – d. 2016, Berlin, Germany) known simply as MARWAN began his career after studying Arabic literature at the Damascus University. In 1957, he moved to Berlin where he attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. He very quickly integrated a group of German expressionist painters, working alongside artists such as Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck, and spent the rest of his life in Berlin where he became a professor at the Akademie der Künste.
His early paintings from the 1960s center on the human figure. Sometimes androgynous, often highly erotic, the depicted characters are decidedly physical and question the human body as an outer self. They are also at the same time disquietingly amorphous. Their shapes trick perspective and their extremities dissolve into the background, as if the painter tried to capture their souls through the depiction of their bodily shells.
In the early 70s, MARWAN’s paintings started to focus solely on the human face, using a horizontal format, and painting the human visage as a landscape, in a blur of topographical features. Over the years, they morphed into what he called “heads”, and he continued to paint these until the end. Abstract brushstrokes in earthly tones at first glance, they reveal themselves as multiple melancholic faces, layered one on top of the other, gazing straight at the viewer from the depth of the canvas.
In the early 70s, MARWAN’s paintings started to focus solely on the human face, using a horizontal format, and painting the human visage as a landscape, in a blur of topographical features. Over the years, they morphed into what he called “heads”, and he continued to paint these until the end. Abstract brushstrokes in earthly tones at first glance, they reveal themselves as multiple melancholic faces, layered one on top of the other, gazing straight at the viewer from the depth of the canvas.
Producing sketches, watercolor drawings, etchings or paintings, MARWAN developed his Sisyphean painting language through a meditative, spiritual approach by painting over and over the same face, often on the same canvas. In his quasi-obsessive search for the essence of beings, and of spirits, in his quasi-mystical Sufi approach to painting, MARWAN’s work clearly carries his oriental roots. It is at the same time highly characteristic of the German expressive painting movement of 1960s Berlin. His distortion and eventually abstraction of forms led him to create overpowering canvases, showing intensely eloquent figures.
After his death, MARWAN’s work was presented at Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019) and Venice Biennale 57 (2017), among others. His work can be found in the collections of MoMA, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof - Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; Tate Modern, London; British Museum, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Bibliothèque National de France, Paris; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation, Darat al Funun, Amman; Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; Kunsthalle Bremen; National Museum, Damascus; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg and many international private collections.