Marwan
Antrepo No.3

Born in 1934, Damascus. Lives in Berlin.

Based in Berlin for five decades, in the 1960s Marwan became an exponent of New Figuration, which at the time was an alternative movement to the more dominant Abstract Expressionism. Marwan's watercolours (1963-2009) and oil paintings (1965-66) depict faces and bodies in undefined and intensively coloured surroundings.
The human head has been Marwan's main subject for over thirty years. In his paintings and watercolours, existentialist undertones find pictorial expression in brutally disfigured human bodies and the obsessive repetition of the human head motif, defying easy identification with 'humanism'. Working slowly and meticulously, adding layer upon layer, Marwan creates figures that unfold onto the surface, tracing people's paranoia and alienation.