Marwan, Untitled, 1977

Lot description

Signed and dated 'marwan 77'. Signed and dated 'marwan Okt. 77' verso on stretcher. “For Marwan, colour is the medium through which he explores humanity’s relationship to the world and its existence within and alongside nature. Yet, without limiting its autonomy, he has never allowed it to become an end in itself. It gives form to figures, landscapes, and objects within a pictorial space unique to them. It grows out of them, permeates them, or holds them in the limbo of their own world of colour. Through the application of paint - in the alternation between impasto-like centers of energy and flat zones of calm, between pure and broken tones - it creates a style that both thematises the act of painting and simultaneously depicts the characteristics of the figures and their world, formulating their rhythm of life and their relationship to one another.” (Lothar Romain, Marwan’s World, in: Marwan, Neunundneunzig Gesichter, exhib.cat., Galerie am Fischmarkt, Erfurt 1999, pp. 5–6) The painter Marwan Kassab-Bachi, known as Marwan, was born in Damascus in 1934 and is one of the defining artistic figures of postwar modernism in Berlin. After studying Arabic literature in Damascus, he came to Berlin in 1957, where he was accepted into Hann Trier’s class at the Academy of Fine Arts and developed an independent visual language that bridges figuration and abstraction. This portrait from 1977 is representative of Marwan’s central series of works, the 'Heads'. The composition shows an extremely close-up detail of a face, extending from the raised eyebrows to a voluminous upper lip that touches the lower edge of the canvas. The head fills the canvas almost entirely and transforms from a physiognomic representation into an autonomous pictorial field. The boundary between face and landscape seems to dissolve; the head becomes a 'facial landscape' in which inner states are inscribed. The painterly execution is characterised by a layered application of paint. Over softly modeled areas lie coloured, undulating, sketch-like brushstrokes that structure the surface and lend the image a rhythmic sense of depth. The variety of colour values that unfolds up close condenses with increasing distance into a tonally cohesive, self-contained overall effect. The portrait offered here comes from a larger collection with a direct connection to the artist. A personal bond developed between the collectors and Marwan in their Berlin neighborhood. It was in this context that the portrait of their son Thomas, executed in egg tempera (A 1292, lot 358), was created in 1975. Other works from the same collection include a still life (lot 359) as well as two abstract compositions, oil on canvas and ink on paper (lots 357 and 360), both created in 1962. As Lothar Romain explains, Marwan’s long career as a painter was marked by distinct phases - that is, thematically and formally differentiated groups of works. Each of these formed its own family of motifs with specific characteristics in the painterly style, yet they always revolved around a common center of artistic intention: the search for an adequate transformation of existential questions into painting, understood as the translation of human existence into the medium of painting. (cf. ibid., p.5)