Photo of Dirk Marwig in Santander, Spain with some of his new friends in 1990 taken by English photographer Hugh Schofield.
It was also at this time that he met his future ‘to be wife’, Paloma Sarbadhikari, a lovely, four year younger woman of Spanish and East Indian decent who grew up in Canada and Kolkata. They were married in Kolkata one and a half years later, returning to settle in Madrid, the city of their choice. Living on a tight budget and with the help of both parents, Dirk Marwig prepared his first one-man show in Madrid, which took place at the Dionis Bennassar Gallery in 1993. With an exiting and prolific new body of work he ventured off into the metaphysical and amniotic realm, making use of symbols, consumer logos in combination with inventive geometry, where reason and unreason co-existed in harmony. Not having a lot of money he would improvise and paint his stories and ideas; “making something beautiful out of discarded things that have a history”, as he describes it, i.e.: something wonderful was created on any kind of surface, which in turn dictated the content. An old winkled sheet of hand-made paper, a piece of battered plywood he found in the street or an old wooden ironing board he plucked from a dumpster would serve as the ideal surface onto which he would meticulously carry out his ideas. He would basically use anything that “spoke to him” and carried potential to express his messages. His largest piece for that show was a painting, an ‘oil on canvas’ he called “The Big Painting” (200cm x 155cm). He worked on it for 6 months, 8 to10 hours daily. This large painting turned into a magnificent, compilation or “map” of minutely detailed, delirious, mathematical and philosophical concepts and ideas with underlying poetic connections, presented in bright and clear Technicolor.