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拍品专文
‘Viewers can immerse themselves in the image; wander among its depths and heights and contemplate the marvels of existence. We are faced with a vast landscape, a topography of the soul.’
– Charlotte Bank
From a swirl of colour conjured by Marwan on the surface, coral and rose, bruised violet and indigo, a brooding face emerges, its contours unclear. For the artist, colour was form itself – in this work, tones simultaneously blur together and refuse one another, and are never exactly as they appear; not monochromatic, but instead multidimensional, individual strokes containing blues, greys and a hint blushing pink. Layered over the course of four years, the multiple dates on the reverse of the work reveal Marwan’s working method – repeated revision and re-consideration, a slow build-up of this saturnine visage. The motif of the head has been Marwan’s preoccupation since the mid-1970s, dominating increasingly large canvases. Making his home in Berlin since 1957, Marwan’s work echoes that of his German contemporaries – the oversized, brutally simplified faces of Georg Baselitz; the tension between abstraction and figuration typical of Markus Lüpertz.
Yet the artist’s work is more liminal, his experience less easy to categorise: an emigré of Damascus, his work retains the memory of another culture, evoking the sensation of diasporic existence. Critics have read Marwan’s work as a record of the recent plight of the Syrian diaspora; the Syrian poet Adunis has written of his art: ‘It is as if Man in his entirety had become a face… and that is the site recording the tragedy of the Arab world’ (Adunis, quoted in J. Tyson, ‘Saturnine Portraits Somewhere Between Damascus and Berlin’. Hyperallergic, December 3, 2015). Marwan himself preferred to transcend such interpretations, referring instead to the spirit-lifting experience of visiting Paris in 1973 and studying the paintings in the collection of the Louvre – in Untitled, the colours of Chaïm Soutine take on a compelling, life-affirming energy. As art historian Charlotte Bank has written of Marwan’s work, ‘Viewers can immerse themselves in the image; wander among its depths and heights and contemplate the marvels of existence. We are faced with a vast landscape, a topography of the soul’ (C. Bank, quoted in N. P. Krishna Kumar, ‘Marwan’s faces revealed’, in Gulf News, December 17, 2014). Straddling the divide between Arab and European, Marwan’s Untitled is a nuanced chorus of colour, singing with the animation of human experience.
– Charlotte Bank
From a swirl of colour conjured by Marwan on the surface, coral and rose, bruised violet and indigo, a brooding face emerges, its contours unclear. For the artist, colour was form itself – in this work, tones simultaneously blur together and refuse one another, and are never exactly as they appear; not monochromatic, but instead multidimensional, individual strokes containing blues, greys and a hint blushing pink. Layered over the course of four years, the multiple dates on the reverse of the work reveal Marwan’s working method – repeated revision and re-consideration, a slow build-up of this saturnine visage. The motif of the head has been Marwan’s preoccupation since the mid-1970s, dominating increasingly large canvases. Making his home in Berlin since 1957, Marwan’s work echoes that of his German contemporaries – the oversized, brutally simplified faces of Georg Baselitz; the tension between abstraction and figuration typical of Markus Lüpertz.
Yet the artist’s work is more liminal, his experience less easy to categorise: an emigré of Damascus, his work retains the memory of another culture, evoking the sensation of diasporic existence. Critics have read Marwan’s work as a record of the recent plight of the Syrian diaspora; the Syrian poet Adunis has written of his art: ‘It is as if Man in his entirety had become a face… and that is the site recording the tragedy of the Arab world’ (Adunis, quoted in J. Tyson, ‘Saturnine Portraits Somewhere Between Damascus and Berlin’. Hyperallergic, December 3, 2015). Marwan himself preferred to transcend such interpretations, referring instead to the spirit-lifting experience of visiting Paris in 1973 and studying the paintings in the collection of the Louvre – in Untitled, the colours of Chaïm Soutine take on a compelling, life-affirming energy. As art historian Charlotte Bank has written of Marwan’s work, ‘Viewers can immerse themselves in the image; wander among its depths and heights and contemplate the marvels of existence. We are faced with a vast landscape, a topography of the soul’ (C. Bank, quoted in N. P. Krishna Kumar, ‘Marwan’s faces revealed’, in Gulf News, December 17, 2014). Straddling the divide between Arab and European, Marwan’s Untitled is a nuanced chorus of colour, singing with the animation of human experience.