IA retrospective of Marwan can currently be seen in Andrée Sfeir-Semler's gallery in Hamburg. The artist from Syria, who was actually called Marwan Kassab Bachi but only called himself Marwan, was still considered an “insider tip” in this country a year before his death in 2016. He lived in Berlin for a long time, studied with Hann Trier at the University of Fine Arts, later took over his chair and over time sold many works to major museums all over the world, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Center Pompidou in Paris. Unlike his fellow student Georg Baselitz, Marwan was never famous. Baselitz wanted to be a hero, Marwan once said. That was never his style.
His style was that of an artist who, in the 1960s, earned money from a furrier during the day and painted at night; who didn't have a contract with a gallery for a long time and sold his large paintings himself from his studio. From this period, the Sfeir-Semler Gallery, which has represented Marwan since 1989, is showing the oil painting “The Foot” (all canvases cost from 170,000 euros, but are reserved for institutions), a typical Marwan of the early years (1966), which in the peculiar deformed portrait sucking on a woman's foot expresses opposite moods: disgust and excitement, pleasure and pain.
Typical Marwan of the early years: “The Foot”, 1966, oil on canvas, 130 by 97 centimeters
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Image: Galerie Sfeir-Semler / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Disfigured figures have remained a leitmotif in Marwan's work. He saw and painted them as vessels that embody erotic, but also social and political longings, inhibitions and prohibitions. With spirited brushstrokes and layered paint, he set his bodies in motion, letting undercurrents flow through them, which often have something uncanny about them. This is especially true of his heads. One of these so-called facial landscapes is also for sale at Sfeir-Semler – the large-format “Light” (1973), which presents a human head as a landscape through which hills and valleys, sun and shadow run.
Because the show brings together a number of images from Marwan's early and late work (from 1964 to 2008), it is possible to understand how his figures became more abstract over the years. The landscape-format facial landscapes gave way to vertical heads, like the large-format head from 2008, when Marwan had already stopped naming his works. The picture shows a head not covered by dark earth colors but by light earth colors, still a face in a landscape, but one filled with bright green and spring, which one can assume was created from memories of his Syrian homeland .
Marwan's work was permeated by this as well as by Sufism throughout his life. The dictum, coined by the art historian and curator Eberhard Roters in the 1960s, that Marwan had found his “artistic Damascus in Berlin,” was accepted until the very end. He said himself that he always felt like an Arab. The motif repertoire of his pictures bears witness to this, while his always expressive style identifies him as a representative of German painting.
Marwan, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg, until March 30th
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