Marwan and the art of exile: ‘his sense of estrangement became a conceptual and a creative force’

‘The face is born while another face dies,’ wrote the painter Marwan Kassab-Bachi, and it’s a good analogy for an artist who spent a lifetime scrutinising his own image with a quizzical eye. Born in Syria, but trained in Germany, he is largely overlooked in Britain. Unlike his contemporary Georg Baselitz, who hit the headlines in the 1980s with his subversive Neo-Expressionist paintings, Marwan (as he is generally known) did not have his first London exhibition until 2015, a year before his death at the age of 82.

This is set to change with a major retrospective at Christie’s in London, running until 22 August 2025. MARWAN: A Soul in Exile, featuring 160 paintings and works on paper made between 1953 and 2014, will bring this unique painter to wider attention.

The exhibition is curated by Dr Ridha Moumni, Chairman of Christie’s Middle East and Africa, who suspects that the artist’s lack of recognition in the West is down to his singluar position as a Syrian artist in Cold War Berlin. His metaphysical paintings, centered on the isolating experience of being an Arab émigré in a city in flux — trapped between the East and the West — explore complexities little understood in Europe at that time.

‘Marwan’s paintings speak the language of exile,’ he says, ‘but only if one is willing to truly read them: to grasp the state of mind, to engage with the writings about him and to understand the deep relationships he cultivated with Arab poets and writers.’

Born into a wealthy family in Damascus in 1934, Marwan showed early artistic promise. He read Arabic literature at Damascus University and then applied to study painting in Paris. His ambitions coincided with the Suez crisis of 1956, and he was barred from entering France. So he went to Germany, eventually enrolling at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Berlin.

‘I sometimes wonder what kind of artist Marwan would have been had he made it to Paris,’ says Moumni. ‘Would he have been a more impressionistic painter perhaps? It is difficult to imagine him without German Expressionism.’

Berlin in 1957 was a contradictory city, not yet divided but already zoned by conflicting ideologies. These systems, at the dawn of the Cold War, filtered down into the art schools. In the East the dominant movement was Socialist Realism, while the West promoted freedom in abstraction.

Marwan found the first constricting and the second nihilistic, and he was not alone. His fellow students Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck echoed his frustration in their 1961 Pandemonic Manifesto, which begins with the end of times: ‘The poets lay in the gutter/their bodies in the morass’.

These artists argued that Germany’s youth needed to find a way through the rubble and the ghosts of war to a new form of visual expression, one that used surrogate figures for their own emotions. Their work could be crude and shocking, and it became known as Neo-Expressionism. Marwan preferred the description ‘New Pathos’.

Their canvases looked like the output of a shattered mind, depicting deformed men with gigantic protrusions, or carcasses splayed upside down, in a style that was tactile and unconstrained, painted in thick, visceral gestures. Marwan embraced the rawness of the style and applied his own distinct perspective, referencing poets, politicians and thinkers in the Arab world who had been tortured and exiled.

Sitzender (Seated Man), painted in 1966, features a shrunken man dominated by a dense background, a manicured finger pressed forcefully into his eye. ‘Rarely has an artist captured the trauma of dislocation and the mystery of selfhood with such a direct intensity,’ says Moumni.

In the 1970s, Marwan invented a new type of painting, one his friend the Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber) termed ‘facial landscapes’. ‘Marwan took the landscape of his childhood around Damascus and infused it with portraiture,’ explains Moumni. The curator describes these images as ‘a face resting on the Earth, between time and eternity’.

The face becomes a strange and uncertain terrain in Marwan’s hands — a tangled mass of earthy reds, oranges and yellows that shear along fault lines as if chasing a picture that wants to escape. For the next decade, the artist pursued this image as it degraded and slowly fragmented into thousands of brushstrokes.

‘What is striking is how Marwan’s sense of estrangement became a conceptual and a creative force,’ says Moumni. ‘It didn’t just shape his biography — it permeates his work.’

One of the most ambitious artworks in the exhibition is 99 Heads (1997-98). The artist once described the face as a ‘cosmos of emotions’, and this work features 99 different facial expressions.

‘It is a deeply symbolic work, which draws upon Sufi doctrine,’ says Moumni, explaining that the work pays homage to the 12th-century poet Ibn Arabi, who wrote: ‘The face is but one, only by counting the mirrors it multiplies.’

It echoes a line from The Face — As Seen by Marwan’s Paint Brush, a poem written in homage to the artist by Adonis: ‘The face is not fixed: it is always in motion.’

‘Over time, Marwan came to realise that his body, his face, his spirit were all inextricably linked to the landscapes of Syria,’ says Moumni. ‘It took him decades to fully embrace this connection. In the end, those landscapes were not only a setting, but an extension of himself. He left part of his soul in Syria, and carried the other with him to Germany.’

Curated by Dr Ridha Moumni, Chairman of Christie’s Middle East and Africa, MARWAN: A Soul in Exile traces the artist’s extensive career, showcasing paintings, works on paper and editions from 1953 to 2014. The retrospective is on show until 22 August 2025 at Christie’s in London, with specialist-led tours available to book