Early Works 1962-1972. The exhibition presents over 140 paintings and works on paper: an exemplary group of the formal and thematic originality of a body of work that draws on features from another time and place.
‘Marwan: Early Works 1962-1972’ presents over 140 paintings and works on paper produced between 1962 and 1972 by the celebrated Syrian painter Marwan.
The exhibition reflects the ambition of the programme of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art to introduce new perspectives on artistic production and its histories.
Mohamed Marouan Kassab-Bachi, known simply as Marwan, is internationally recognized as one of the great contemporary Arab artists. Born in Damascus in 1934, he left Syria in 1957, settling in Berlin, where he continues to live and work. It was in post-War Berlin, as a student of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, that he came into first hand contact with European painting, and with a younger generation of artists including his contemporary Georg Baselitz with whom he was associated with the so-called New Figuration.
The works produced between 1962 and 1972 are an exemplary group of the formal and thematic originality of a body of work that draws on features from another time and place. A large number of works - especially those on paper - have rarely been exhibited outside Germany and are still in the artist’s possession. These pieces highlight several themes which are recurrent in Marwan’s work, including portraits and self-portraits, ‘head-landscapes’, silhouettes covered by veils hiding faces and young figures, alone or in groups, representing the collective and anonymous figures. These paintings, watercolours and drawings bear witness to an obstinately individual experience with painting, in which introspection and intimate obsessions come together in the expression of the restlessness and frustrations shared by a generation of Arab artists and intellectuals, to which Marwan belongs.
Curators: Catherine David, Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris)
Organization: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art
Image: Marwan, Selbstbildnis [Selfportrait], 1964. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Private collection. Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen
Marta Morais
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