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Lot Essay
Marwan Kassab-Bachi, known simply as MARWAN, stands as one of the most influential artists in modern and contemporary art. Born in 1934 in Damascus, Syria, he was raised amid the city’s vibrant cultural circles and the rural landscapes of Al-Qasimiyah, where the distinctive Damascene light and scenery deeply shaped his artistic imagination. His early work focused on landscapes, shaped by the Syrian landscapist Nasser Chaura as well as the impressionistic sensibilities of Claude Monet and Édouard Manet. In 1957, MARWAN left Syria, intending to study in Paris, but settled in Berlin, where he remained for the rest of his life. At the Hochschule der Künste, he studied under Hann Trier, absorbing the gestural freedom of German Informel while encountering the confrontational figuration of artists such as Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck. These influences, combined with the memory of Damascus, shaped a distinctive visual language that merged European experimentation with his Arab heritage.
In his early Berlin years, MARWAN explored expressionism, still lifes, and figural compositions, gradually turning to the human face. By the 1970s, his “facial landscapes” transformed features into terrain, cheeks suggesting hills, brows evoking horizons, where memory, geography, and emotion intertwined. However, after the death of his sister Raqia in 1983, his work evolved into the monumental “Heads”, vertical, silent, and confronting the viewer directly. These forms abandoned individual likeness, becoming archetypal presences imbued with notions of grief, exile, and resilience.
Painted between 2013 and 2014, Kopf (Head), exemplifies this late period. A solitary head dominates the vertical canvas, its features shadowed and framed by a yellow halo-like structure that dissolves into the surrounding atmosphere. Layered strokes of ochre, crimson, and brilliant blue evoke both corporeal fragility and spiritual luminosity, suggesting an interior landscape suspended between presence and dissolution. During this period, MARWAN returned with renewed urgency to colour, abstraction, and the expressive force of form, pushing further into the territory where memory, poetry, and spirit converge. While the human head remained central, it was treated with increasing openness, the dense, heavily modelled faces of earlier years giving way to a more atmospheric approach, where forms dissolve into broad, layered fields of colour. His enduring fascination with Paul Cézanne resurfaced with fresh clarity, enriched by a deepened internal sensibility. Texture, emotional resonance, and reminiscence fused into a visual language in which yellows, reds, and greens move across the canvas in a loose, rhythmic flow.
Kopf (Head), in its solemn simplicity and layered complexity, embodies this synthesis, transforming the human visage into a universal symbol of memory, loss, and resilience. Its quiet power and reflective depth mark it as a culminating expression in the long arc of MARWAN’s career, created in the years preceding his death in 2016.
Marwan’s works are included in major international collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Berlinische Galerie-Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.
In his early Berlin years, MARWAN explored expressionism, still lifes, and figural compositions, gradually turning to the human face. By the 1970s, his “facial landscapes” transformed features into terrain, cheeks suggesting hills, brows evoking horizons, where memory, geography, and emotion intertwined. However, after the death of his sister Raqia in 1983, his work evolved into the monumental “Heads”, vertical, silent, and confronting the viewer directly. These forms abandoned individual likeness, becoming archetypal presences imbued with notions of grief, exile, and resilience.
Painted between 2013 and 2014, Kopf (Head), exemplifies this late period. A solitary head dominates the vertical canvas, its features shadowed and framed by a yellow halo-like structure that dissolves into the surrounding atmosphere. Layered strokes of ochre, crimson, and brilliant blue evoke both corporeal fragility and spiritual luminosity, suggesting an interior landscape suspended between presence and dissolution. During this period, MARWAN returned with renewed urgency to colour, abstraction, and the expressive force of form, pushing further into the territory where memory, poetry, and spirit converge. While the human head remained central, it was treated with increasing openness, the dense, heavily modelled faces of earlier years giving way to a more atmospheric approach, where forms dissolve into broad, layered fields of colour. His enduring fascination with Paul Cézanne resurfaced with fresh clarity, enriched by a deepened internal sensibility. Texture, emotional resonance, and reminiscence fused into a visual language in which yellows, reds, and greens move across the canvas in a loose, rhythmic flow.
Kopf (Head), in its solemn simplicity and layered complexity, embodies this synthesis, transforming the human visage into a universal symbol of memory, loss, and resilience. Its quiet power and reflective depth mark it as a culminating expression in the long arc of MARWAN’s career, created in the years preceding his death in 2016.
Marwan’s works are included in major international collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Berlinische Galerie-Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.