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Lot Essay
‘For Marwan, the face is the most expressive of all landscapes; it is a universe whose emotion requires continual unfolding’ (Omar Kholeif)
Textural brushstrokes in purple, green and fiery earth tones coalesce to form a towering presence in Marwan’s Kopfporträt (Head Portrait) (1988-1989). Almost two metres in height, the work is an impressive example of the dense and monumental ‘heads’ the artist began to paint in the 1980s. Evolving from the ‘facial landscapes’ that had dominated his work of the previous decade, these paintings were born of an outpouring of emotion in the wake of his sister’s death in 1983. The present work’s impastoed surface is built up through staccato flurries of colour—applied directly, without underdrawing—which build into a totemic, rectangular face that regards us with a solemn gaze. It was recently included in Marwan: A Soul in Exile, a landmark retrospective of the artist’s work held at Christie’s London in the summer of 2025.
Marwan was born in Damascus in 1934 and moved to Germany to study art in 1957, enrolling in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. During the early years of the Cold War Germany was already a divided country, with the East privileging Socialist Realism and the West the freedom of abstraction. Like his friend and fellow student Georg Baselitz, Marwan accepted neither. He forged a raw, uncompromising painterly language influenced by German Expressionism, expressing complex emotions through human figures. He explored his position as a dislocated person, incorporating references to poets, politicians and thinkers in the Arab world who themselves had been exiled.
Across the years Marwan honed in on the human form as his subject, deconstructing, transforming and reanimating faces and bodies in an ever more intense exploration of selfhood. ‘The human face as it appeared in Marwan’s work’, writes Omar Kholeif, ‘was one of violence and of beauty: a face that could look into and unfold the intangible qualities of what might live and breathe behind the formal confines of a traditional face. He once said to me, “I paint souls.” Marwan’s faces became landscapes, worlds that we could enter and let ourselves be free to dream within’ (O. Kholeif, ‘Marwan Kassab-Bachi (1934–2016)’, Artforum, 7 December 2016).
During the 1970s Marwan created the ‘facial landscapes’ that are among his most recognisable works. These faces became enigmatic, sweeping terrains of fragmented brushwork, infused with memories of the land around his childhood home in Syria. Chinks of light flashed through their billowing colours. The ensuing series to which Kopfporträt belongs condensed this language into more weighty, compacted surfaces and totemic forms. The death of Marwan’s sister, the last of his surviving relatives, had also meant the loss of a living connection to his homeland. Standing sentinel like a memorial statue, Kopfporträt exemplifies the melancholy grandeur of these works. Its dynamic, vivid brushstrokes capture the mission of an artist who was committed to a fierce engagement with the shifting mysteries of identity, belonging and the self.
Textural brushstrokes in purple, green and fiery earth tones coalesce to form a towering presence in Marwan’s Kopfporträt (Head Portrait) (1988-1989). Almost two metres in height, the work is an impressive example of the dense and monumental ‘heads’ the artist began to paint in the 1980s. Evolving from the ‘facial landscapes’ that had dominated his work of the previous decade, these paintings were born of an outpouring of emotion in the wake of his sister’s death in 1983. The present work’s impastoed surface is built up through staccato flurries of colour—applied directly, without underdrawing—which build into a totemic, rectangular face that regards us with a solemn gaze. It was recently included in Marwan: A Soul in Exile, a landmark retrospective of the artist’s work held at Christie’s London in the summer of 2025.
Marwan was born in Damascus in 1934 and moved to Germany to study art in 1957, enrolling in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. During the early years of the Cold War Germany was already a divided country, with the East privileging Socialist Realism and the West the freedom of abstraction. Like his friend and fellow student Georg Baselitz, Marwan accepted neither. He forged a raw, uncompromising painterly language influenced by German Expressionism, expressing complex emotions through human figures. He explored his position as a dislocated person, incorporating references to poets, politicians and thinkers in the Arab world who themselves had been exiled.
Across the years Marwan honed in on the human form as his subject, deconstructing, transforming and reanimating faces and bodies in an ever more intense exploration of selfhood. ‘The human face as it appeared in Marwan’s work’, writes Omar Kholeif, ‘was one of violence and of beauty: a face that could look into and unfold the intangible qualities of what might live and breathe behind the formal confines of a traditional face. He once said to me, “I paint souls.” Marwan’s faces became landscapes, worlds that we could enter and let ourselves be free to dream within’ (O. Kholeif, ‘Marwan Kassab-Bachi (1934–2016)’, Artforum, 7 December 2016).
During the 1970s Marwan created the ‘facial landscapes’ that are among his most recognisable works. These faces became enigmatic, sweeping terrains of fragmented brushwork, infused with memories of the land around his childhood home in Syria. Chinks of light flashed through their billowing colours. The ensuing series to which Kopfporträt belongs condensed this language into more weighty, compacted surfaces and totemic forms. The death of Marwan’s sister, the last of his surviving relatives, had also meant the loss of a living connection to his homeland. Standing sentinel like a memorial statue, Kopfporträt exemplifies the melancholy grandeur of these works. Its dynamic, vivid brushstrokes capture the mission of an artist who was committed to a fierce engagement with the shifting mysteries of identity, belonging and the self.