Marwan was born in 1934, in Damascus, Syria. In 1957, he went to Berlin. Marwan quickly became attached to the city and decided to attend Hann Trier’s painting class at the Academy of Arts in the district of Charlottenburg. In divided Berlin, he found a completely different art scene compared to the one in Damascus. In that period, informalism was dominant, and its prominent representative was Hann Trier. Marwan’s teacher encouraged him to find a more unrestrained form and to free himself from the influence of European painting. However, he quickly went back to more figurative elements – his own face and body, or surreal, gloomy landscapes – but using a free, abstract language of colours and forms.
In the 1960s, he painted self-portraits that speak about his experience of loneliness, erotic longing, and the feeling of being foreign. During that period, he also painted political portraits of known activists and intellectuals in the Arabic world. Around 1970, the first Gesichtslandschaften (Face Landscapes) were created, which picture disfigured and distorted faces with deep wrinkles that look like landscapes up close.They are continued in Köpfe (Heads), which were painted from the 1980s and further the abstract approach to surfaces. With thick brush strokes and thick paints such as red-brown, ochre, grey, and black, he created single and double portraits of himself, his friends, and unknown people.
For Marwan, who worked with his face as a motif for decades, this was a means of exploring his own self, internal mood, and spirituality. With each glance, the works are created anew, and without individual features they are a symbol of the constant internal and external mercuriality of humans. In the large-scale oil paintings and watercolours from the Marionetten 253(Marionettes) series (ca 1980), vivid colours are clearly present, applied with intense brush strokes. Just as the faces become landscapes, the dolls presented in distorted poses turn into still lifes.Marwan lived and worked in Berlin until his death in 2016.
