Lara Abu Dahab Research Intern labudahab@christies.com
Marwan: A Soul in Exile is made possible with the generous support from
Exhibition sponsors
Events partner
INTRODUCTION
Marwan Kassab-Bachi, known simply as Marwan, stands among the most compelling and distinctive voices in modern and contemporary art. Born in 1934 into a bourgeois family in Damascus, he was shaped by a city vibrant with intellectual vitality and political turbulence in the years following Syria’s independence in 1943. From a young age, Marwan exhibited exceptional talent, earning first prize for sculpture while still a student. Although he initially pursued Arabic literature academically, his artistic calling soon took shape, defining the trajectory of his lifelong practice.
Immersed in Damascus’ intellectual circles of poets, thinkers, and activists, Marwan was poised to become a leading young artist in Syria and the broader Arab world. In 1957, however, he chose to leave for Germany, intending only a brief stay before relocating to Paris to study French Impressionism—a movement that had profoundly influenced his early work, particularly Monet and Manet, alongside the Syrian landscapist Nasser Chaura.
In Syria, Marwan painted bright, colourful scenes, often depicting landscapes and female figures. Yet in the melancholic twilight of Berlin—a city still recovering from war and division—he was drawn into a new artistic milieu. Under the mentorship of Hann Trier, he encountered German Informel, a movement that favoured expressive abstraction and gestural freedom. While his initial influences were rooted in French lyricism and the luminous Syrian light, Berlin awakened in him a raw, visceral engagement with the human form and psyche.
Even as he embraced new techniques and absorbed a different cultural context, Marwan never relinquished the deep imprint of his origins. Raised amidst the
farmlands surrounding Damascus, he carried within him the haunting vistas of the plains and the presence of Mount Qasioun: an unconscious gravitational centre that would later resurface in his celebrated landscape portraits of the 1970s.
Gradually, Marwan moved away from overt representations of others, turning instead to the male figure and, ultimately, his own face—rendered not as a likeness but as an anonymous, obsessive repetition. In these visages, form became terrain, surface became inner geography: each one an echo of a mountain, the curve of a distant horizon, or the tremor of memory. In the solitude of his Berlin studio, Marwan often looked into the small mirror he used for his portraits, seeing not merely his face, but the landscape of his spirit. That mirror became a portal to his past, and in its reflection rose the spectral outlines of Mount Qasioun—transformed into ridges and valleys across his painted heads.
Despite his physical departure, Marwan’s bond to Syria remained indelible, as he maintained a profound connection to the Middle East throughout his six decades in Germany. He continued to speak and write in Arabic, corresponding with poets and novelists such as Abdelrahman Munif. In these letters, he expressed his deep love for his Arab identity, a spirit that shaped the very core of his work. These exchanges preserved the essence of Arabic poetic thought, carrying confessions and reflections across time and space, and led to one of the most significant collaborations between a writer and a painter in modern Arab culture. Another emerged through his friendship with Syrian poet Adonis, which ultimately inspired the creation of 99 Heads (Ibn Arabi), a pivotal series that captures the mystical depths of Marwan’s life and practice.
One of the most profound shifts in Marwan’s art came after the loss of his sister Raqia, the last member of his immediate family. Her death in 1983 marked a deep rupture. It was then that Marwan moved from his Facial Landscapes to the Heads—imposing, confrontational, silent sentinels that now met the viewer’s gaze directly. Where once his faces turned aside, or were seen from above, now they rose vertically, stripped of veil or evasiveness as if to confront mortality, the void, and the unknown all at once.
His faces, monumental yet intimate, carry the weight of political disillusionment and the fragility of the human condition; each an invocation of the topography of Damascus, reimagined in the contours of an immersive, melancholic visage. These heads are not portraits; they are presences, haunted and haunting, silent witnesses to an inner and collective history. They speak to alienation, to desire, to the unending search for selfhood beyond the constraints of geography or nationality—a language that feels even more urgent a decade after his death.
Marwan could not escape the presence of his past, nor the echo of his cultural and visual memory. As a professor at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and a member of the German Academy of Arts, he naturally extended his role as mentor beyond borders. At Darat al Funun in Amman, he guided a generation of young Arab artists, offering not just technical instruction but a profound sense of solidarity and empathy. There, he bore witness to the struggles and hopes of young creatives from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, affirming his enduring commitment to the region and helping shape artistic communities that today stand as part of his legacy—a way to reconcile his solitude and his distance with a sense of belonging.
In his later works, forms dissolve and the face itself becomes an ethereal field, no longer searching but simply being. Here, the restless spirit seems to find, if not resolution, then a momentary rest. The mountain of Damascus, once hidden in the brow, emerges in spirit as Marwan himself becomes the mountain: steadfast, immovable, yet vibrantly alive. Through his works, Marwan resisted erasure. He transformed exile into a fertile space for introspection and expression, using each canvas as a conversation between the visible and the silent. His art of serial repetition and mystical layering insists on the irreducible mystery of the self and the resonant power of memory. In the quiet, luminous surfaces of Marwan’s final heads, we encounter not resignation but a profound act of affirmation: a stubborn devotion to memory and an insistence on the political and poetic power of presence, in peace with the divine.
Through Marwan’s work, viewers are invited to stand face to face with themselves, to inhabit the fragile territory between belonging and loss and to find a glimpse of the infinite. Ultimately, Marwan’s entire journey can be read as the story of a spirit in perpetual migration—forever moving between lands and languages, yet always returning, through paint, memory, and breath, to a place he never truly left.
In 1957, Marwan arrived in Berlin from Damascus, intending only for a brief stop on his way to Paris, where he had hoped to study Impressionism and the Paris School that had influenced his early practice. Instead, he found himself drawn into Berlin’s post-war art scene—a city scarred by war and politically fractured, where artists were seeking reconnection with international art movements. From 1957 to 1963, Marwan studied at the Hochschule der Künste under Hann Trier, a prominent figure of the German Informel movement.
Initially aligned with German Informel, Abstract Expressionism and French Tachisme, Marwan’s early figurative experiments evoke dark, dreamlike terrains populated by distorted bodies and surreal creatures. These paintings reflect a profound sense of isolation of the artist— working by day in a tannery and painting by night. He gradually shifted towards figuration, often using his own body and face as subject matter. At the time, figuration was largely dismissed in Germany as outdated, but a new wave of artists—including Eugen Schönebeck and Georg Baselitz— was beginning to challenge conventions through a provocative manifesto and figurative works confronting post-war trauma.
Faces contorted by longing, fragmented anatomies, and haunting figures elicit both personal and collective disquiet. In his unsettling portrait of Khaddouj, Marwan revisits a spectral and troubling figure rooted in childhood memory through which he explores unresolved psychological wounds and repressed sexual desires. Deeply autobiographical yet universal in resonance, these works echo a shared existential vulnerability, shaped by exile and his search for belonging. This introspective depth would come to define Marwan’s visual language, and his early artistic evolution culminated in his first solo exhibition at Galerie Springer in 1967, marking the beginning of his presence in Berlin’s art scene.
MARWAN (1934, DAMASCUS - 2016, BERLIN)
Ohne Titel (Hansaviertel) (Untitled (Hansaviertel))
While Marwan initially devoted himself exclusively to painting and sculpture in Syria, he later found in paper a preferred medium for exploring drawing as well as printmaking. Drawing was his favoured way of giving himself to creation, and of reading his imagination. Demanding of himself, Marwan destroyed many of his works on paper in 1963, marking a decisive turn toward delving deeper into his subconscious.
Drawing became a space where he could fix the fleeting images of his dreams and probe the depths of his inner world. Marwan’s drawings and watercolours were shaped by a quiet, contemplative universe, often centred around the human figure. These compositions exist in a world of silences—devoid of perspective or background—suspended between light and shadow. As he began working in engraving and lithography at the same time, his drawings—sometimes fragmenting the body, sometimes bordering on the absurd—allowed Marwan to better assimilate the forms and structures that would later appear on his canvases.
From 1963 to 1973, Marwan gave particular emphasis to works on paper, returning to the same motifs in a quest for form through repetition. He described this process as “a growing hallucination,” akin to “the spinning of the Sufi dervish”—an image that evokes ritual, and rhythm, leading to inner transformation.
In 1950s Damascus—a city under waves of political and social change— Marwan moved among intellectuals, artists, and activists. Immersed in revolutionary ideals, he devoted himself to activism and even considered dedicating himself to it completely. Yet life in Berlin gradually softened this fervour, leading him to declare: “There are many revolutionaries, but few artists. Above all, I am an artist. In 1962, I decided to abandon organisational political frameworks to devote myself entirely to art.”
Despite this shift, Marwan remained profoundly bound to his homeland, which continued to endure deep turmoil. He turned to themes of alienation, desire, and collective unrest. He portrayed figures such as the Jordanian-Syrian Munif al-Razzaz, the exiled and tortured political thinker, and the Iraqi poet and activist Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, capturing them in fragmented, spectral portraits. Their heads often appear against wooden or iron bases, flanked by pieces of meat—evoking suffering, martyrdom, and a haunting disillusionment with the Arab world. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Marwan created a series of figures with faces veiled by keffiyehs, scarves, and cloths—echoing the fedayeen (freedom fighters). These shrouded faces spoke of anonymity and silent resistance.
This exploration of hidden identities found powerful expression in Three Palestinian Boys (1970), where Marwan depicted three young figures from a low angle—their elongated bodies monumental yet their heads: small and vulnerable. Here, Marwan distils the crushing weight of conflict and exile, transforming youthful forms into timeless emblems of resistance and collective sorrow.
MARWAN (1934, DAMASCUS - 2016, BERLIN)
Ohne Titel (Der Verhüllte) (Untitled (The Disappeared))
The early 1970s marked a pivotal moment in Marwan’s artistic journey, signifying a profound transformation in both his surroundings and vision. In 1973, he was awarded a scholarship at Cité Internationale des Arts, allowing him to reside in Paris and devote himself fully to painting. The distinct clarity of Parisian light brought with it a newfound freedom in both gesture and spirit—unlike the darker, more oppressive tones of his earlier works in Berlin. Immersed in this luminosity, and inspired by the French painters he admired, Marwan discovered a visual language in which colour expanded and shimmered.
The Parisian Head, painted in 1973 as his first work produced in the city, reflects new tonalities—among them a baroque crimson—that introduced a theatrical atmosphere into his compositions. This period marked the beginning of what would become his most iconic body of work: the Facial Landscapes. Borne from his meditative fixations with the mirror, these works transformed reflection into a space of distortion and fragmentation. The face, rendered anonymous and stripped of vanity, became the centre of Marwan’s expressive universe. It echoed the contours of his native Damascene landscape, especially Mount Qasioun—never directly depicted but deeply felt in the swell of a brow, the slope of a cheek, or the furrowed lines of a forehead. Nostalgia and topography fused into a language of introspection. In these monumental heads—layered with colour and reworked obsessively—Marwan abandoned portraiture in favour of existential revelation: the self as terrain, the face as inner landscape.
1976 marked a decisive turning point in Marwan’s career: his work was presented for the first time in New York at Gruenebaum Gallery and in Berlin at Lietzow Gallery. On November 6th, a major mid-career retrospective, Marwan 1966–1976, opened at Große Orangerie Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin. The exhibition showcased 86 works from this transformative decade in Marwan’s practice, and solidified his reputation in the city’s art scene. At the heart of the exhibition was his continuous exploration of the human face—especially the Facial Landscapes.
These works moved beyond representational accuracy, embracing psychological intensity through monumental, expressive forms verging on abstraction. Rendered in layers of saturated, often clashing colours, the faces blur the line between physical presence and emotional depth, inviting projection rather than recognition. Marwan’s portraits became expressions of solitude, estrangement, and longing—never strictly autobiographical, but deeply shaped by his experience of exile.
The exhibition affirmed his status as a painter of deep inward vision, whose hybrid perspective—Syrian by birth, German by life—produced a unique, yet resonant idiom. Nineteen years after his arrival in Berlin, the Charlottenburg exhibition marked a critical juncture: major institutional recognition of his contributions to post-war German expressionism. It also stands as one of the most significant exhibitions ever dedicated to an artist from the Arab diaspora in Europe. Its impact was lasting—just a year later, Marwan was appointed assistant professor of painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, opening a new chapter as both a recognised artist and a mentor to a new generation of young painters.
In the late 1970s, Marwan turned inward. The still life, long considered static and decorative, became for him a site of emotional transition. His compositions ranged from fruit and vessels rendered with chromatic richness to increasingly abstracted arrangements, where objects became fragments of memory—bearing the traces of loss and longing. Within this evolving language, a singular figure emerged: the marionette. Neither fully object nor human, it entered Marwan’s work not merely as a motif, but as a surrogate body—alive only in gaze, still in being.
Acquired in Berlin in 1975, the Japanese string puppet lay inert in his studio until, as he recalled, “it became part of my presence.” Between 1978 and 1983, it took centre stage in a series where still lifes blurred into portraiture, and figuration opened onto symbolism. Rendered in layers of saturated colour and rhythmic brushwork, these puppets occupy a space in motion yet suspended—speaking of theatricality and the uncanny condition of being watched, shaped, and silenced. The marionette’s presence grew heavier after 1983, as it lingered at the edges of the Head paintings that began to transform throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It remained a quiet witness to this stylistic evolution—a symbol of the soul’s entrapment. What began as a study of form acquired a spiritual charge. Through the stillness of objects, Marwan gave voice to silence— and through the marionette, he painted the loneliness of being.
In 1983, following the death of his beloved sister Raqia—the last member of his immediate family—Marwan’s painting underwent profound transformation. In a letter to writer Abdelrahman Munif, he confided: “My painting has indeed changed; my first painting after my sister’s death was the first head.” That first Head marked a rupture. Where the Face Landscapes of the 1970s stretched horizontally across the canvas, the Heads of the 1980s and 1990s rose in vertical stillness.
No longer viewed in profile or from above, these faces turned directly to the viewer, confronting the gaze with solemn truth, stripped of veil or distance. Marwan worked in dense layers of pigment—earthy ochres, burnt siennas, deep blues, and blood-crimson—abandoning preparatory sketches in favour of intuition. His brushstrokes were applied, erased, and reapplied, building surfaces where the image flickered between presence and absence. Some canvases took years to complete. He photographed each stage meticulously, tracing the quiet evolution of the work as it shifted, settled, and reformed. These Heads are not portraits, they are presences—monumental yet tender, silent yet charged. They are emblems of being, untethered from place or time. Between mourning and stillness, they speak without words. Through them, Marwan rendered the invisible visible, transforming the canvas into a liminal space—where loss lingers, and something deeply human endures.
Though Marwan spent most of his life in Germany, his bond with the Arab world remained unwavering—rooted in friendship, creative dialogue, and memory. Syria was never far. His early exhibitions in Damascus in 1970 and Baghdad in 1980 signalled a lasting attachment, one that deepened in the 1990s through renewed recognition in Paris, notably at the Institut du Monde Arabe. In 1994, he returned to Damascus with an exhibition at Atassi Gallery, marking the beginning of his collaboration with Mouna and Myla Atassi.
The gallery became a haven, and Damascus a place of return, reunion, and reflection. Letters flowed between Marwan and his circle—novelist Abdelrahman Munif, poet Adonis, artist Nazir Nabaa and his wife Shalabiya Ibrahim—rich with confessions and shared dreams. These friendships were lifelines, anchoring him to a homeland he never truly left. Between 1999 and 2003, Marwan led the Summer Academy at Darat al Funun in Amman, guiding a generation of young Arab artists— including those from Beirut, Gaza, Damascus and Baghdad—with quiet intensity and deep generosity. He offered more than instruction; he cultivated a sense of artistic community. Among his students were Ayman and Said Baalbaki, Tagreed Darghouth, Serwan Baran, and Hazem Harb—artists who would shape the contemporary Arab art scene, and who considered Marwan an incomparable mentor, some following him all the way to Germany. Marwan’s legacy lies not only in the power of his paintings, but in the lives and minds he shaped. He gave others the courage to turn ideas into form, memory into light. Even from afar, he remained deeply present—an artist whose art and soul, with time, longed ever more to return home.
Marwan’s late works radiate a profound serenity—paintings that unfold like meditations on time. They mark the quiet culmination of a lifelong devotion: six decades spent transforming the face into a landscape, the self into a terrain of introspection. In these final years, the density of earlier forms gives way to openness and light. Facial features dissolve into broad, vibrant fields of colour—gestures layered delicately, like suspended breaths. The heads no longer anchor themselves to place or time. They rise in vertical stillness, hovering between earth and sky, as if reaching toward the divine. At times, they resemble masks—symbols of passage and anonymity. Some are encircled by braids of colour, suggesting both hair and halo, threshold and veil. These frames recall the open doors of Roman sarcophagi, evoking transition and the quiet mystery of an afterlife.
Cézanne’s influence emerges here with clarity. As the Sainte-Victoire mountain was to Cézanne, the head becomes for Marwan a motif endlessly revisited—not to define, but to feel. From afar, a face; up close, a shimmer of colour, a vibration of memory. In these final works, the mountain of Damascus—once hinted at in the curve of a cheek—vanishes. Marwan becomes that mountain. His last heads no longer search; they rest. The soul, no longer in exile, surrenders to the present—still, luminous, and open to the mysteries that lie ahead.
MARWAN (1934, DAMASCUS - 2016, BERLIN)
Kopf (Head)
oil on canvas
195 x 146cm.
Painted in 2013
Image courtesy of Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut
Etched in black and white, suspended between flesh and spirit, 99 Heads (Ibn Arabi) distills the essence of Marwan’s vision—his lifelong dialogue with the human face and its metaphysical weight. Conceived between summer 1997 and spring 1998, the series began as a plan for 75 works inspired by a poem by Syrian poet Adonis, but expanded to 135 prints, from which 99 were chosen to reflect the 99 names of God. The series unfolds as a meditation on the face, not as likeness, but as a threshold: between self and other, the visible and the divine. Drawing on the teachings of 12th-century Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi and his concept of Wahdat al-Wujud (Unity of Being), these heads embody multiplicity within unity—each a fragment of the infinite. Some confront the viewer directly; others dissolve into trembling lines and spectral absence. Marwan’s technical mastery is evident: etching, aquatint, sugar lift, and chine-collé converge into richly textured surfaces that balance control and improvisation.
Exhibited in dense, rhythmic arrangements—at Darat al-Funun in Amman (1998), Khan Assad Pasha in Damascus (2005), and the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin (2008–09)—they evoke a secret dialogue among the heads, with an empty frame symbolizing the ineffable, the divine presence beyond form. 99 Heads stands among Marwan’s most important works: not portraits but traces—echoes of a reality just beyond sight. Beneath it lies a quiet thread: his lifelong questioning of existence and the divine—hidden, yet always present.
