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Lot Essay
‘Throughout [Marwan’s] paintings, the pulse of his visual field throbbed with a gestural mode of expression that left its distinguished markings and textural traces on the canvas. Employing broad brush strokes and avoiding any linear definition, features of the close-up face were blurred and fragmented as it reflected a perpetually fluttering impression and a diffused sense of volume cloaking the painted self with a mystery that recalls the kind of ambivalence and ambiguity the painting of his earlier selves. This new method of painting his abstracted faces produced the appearance of a multiplicity of faces in the one and the same face’ (Artist Kamal Boullata in ‘Reading the Body in Marwan’s Painting’, Meem Editions, MARWAN, Dubai 2015, p. 12)
Considered one of the most celebrated Modern art painters in the Arab world with over six decades of artistic production, Marwan was an icon for merging Western modes of expression with his Syrian culture showcasing a unique Expressionist style. Living in exile since 1957 in Germany until his death in 2016, he arrived at the height of the Cold War Era and within a country following a period of war and destruction. Taught by the acclaimed German artist Hann Trier (1915-1999), Marwan produced a free range of expression with a uniquely personal manner with movement and gesture in applications of paint, colour and representation inspired by the German-Post War era.
His oeuvre encompassed drawing, etching, watercolour and oil painting, as he depicted standing figures, marionettes, and along with his most well-known motif -- faces and heads, whereby he effectively generating a language of his own. Since the 1970s, the artist began painting portraits known as ‘face landscapes’, depicting most notably of his friends and colleagues, and including self-portraits that imbue a landscape-like quality into the soul of the sitter. Working with a refined patience, sometimes his work took several years and transformations in medium for them to be complete. His faces, most notably heads and marionette dolls captivate the viewer, orchestrated within a range of moods, cropped elements, from his early facial landscapes to his monumental towering heads and then to his double figure works.
We are happy to be offering three masterpieces (lots 59, 60 & 61) by the artist covering over three decades of his practice. Unlike his earlier works, such as lot 59 that were produced in curved, violent brushstrokes with an unsettling effect, his later works, such as lots 60 & 61 unravel layers of the self in full static, frontal view with sharp but gentle melodious lines, the object of the desire literally dissolves before his eyes. Non-representational fragments coalesce into an organic shape, crystallising organically and slowly once the viewers recedes. In some instances the head is not presented in its entirety, cropped from the top and bottom within restrictive framing, and it is from a distance we recognize the bulging red lips, the eyes, eyebrows, faint nose and the hair. They are anonymous faces, produced in striking vertical form in monumental proportions, reducing the portrait to its most essential close up components, becoming an enigma, with dashes, stabs, and fluent twirls.
Marwan’s technique in overpainting, merges both abstraction and figuration, and he would change the composition subtletly; sometimes days or months after the painting was done, he changed it again, reworking and chiseling the features of the sculpted canvas. The artist both maximises the painterly space and makes the most of the shapes and lines in order to create a completely extraordinary universe.
In many ways these works reveals themselves as bearing qualities of his series of marionette dolls. Embodying the expression of mere appearance, the viewer is captivated by an impenetrable veiled gaze of a recognizable form but that is strangely lifeless at the same time. The works take on a unique quality of performance, that doesn’t shy away from theatricality.
Considered one of the most celebrated Modern art painters in the Arab world with over six decades of artistic production, Marwan was an icon for merging Western modes of expression with his Syrian culture showcasing a unique Expressionist style. Living in exile since 1957 in Germany until his death in 2016, he arrived at the height of the Cold War Era and within a country following a period of war and destruction. Taught by the acclaimed German artist Hann Trier (1915-1999), Marwan produced a free range of expression with a uniquely personal manner with movement and gesture in applications of paint, colour and representation inspired by the German-Post War era.
His oeuvre encompassed drawing, etching, watercolour and oil painting, as he depicted standing figures, marionettes, and along with his most well-known motif -- faces and heads, whereby he effectively generating a language of his own. Since the 1970s, the artist began painting portraits known as ‘face landscapes’, depicting most notably of his friends and colleagues, and including self-portraits that imbue a landscape-like quality into the soul of the sitter. Working with a refined patience, sometimes his work took several years and transformations in medium for them to be complete. His faces, most notably heads and marionette dolls captivate the viewer, orchestrated within a range of moods, cropped elements, from his early facial landscapes to his monumental towering heads and then to his double figure works.
We are happy to be offering three masterpieces (lots 59, 60 & 61) by the artist covering over three decades of his practice. Unlike his earlier works, such as lot 59 that were produced in curved, violent brushstrokes with an unsettling effect, his later works, such as lots 60 & 61 unravel layers of the self in full static, frontal view with sharp but gentle melodious lines, the object of the desire literally dissolves before his eyes. Non-representational fragments coalesce into an organic shape, crystallising organically and slowly once the viewers recedes. In some instances the head is not presented in its entirety, cropped from the top and bottom within restrictive framing, and it is from a distance we recognize the bulging red lips, the eyes, eyebrows, faint nose and the hair. They are anonymous faces, produced in striking vertical form in monumental proportions, reducing the portrait to its most essential close up components, becoming an enigma, with dashes, stabs, and fluent twirls.
Marwan’s technique in overpainting, merges both abstraction and figuration, and he would change the composition subtletly; sometimes days or months after the painting was done, he changed it again, reworking and chiseling the features of the sculpted canvas. The artist both maximises the painterly space and makes the most of the shapes and lines in order to create a completely extraordinary universe.
In many ways these works reveals themselves as bearing qualities of his series of marionette dolls. Embodying the expression of mere appearance, the viewer is captivated by an impenetrable veiled gaze of a recognizable form but that is strangely lifeless at the same time. The works take on a unique quality of performance, that doesn’t shy away from theatricality.