Lot 614 R

A puppet embodies a lifeless shell which only comes alive through human operation. It acts a a medium through which the puppetier speaks to his audience. Marwan reflects an emotional experience with these objects by animating them by means of his expressive painting. The artist processes the richly associative figure, and characterises it as a personal expression of human existence. ''In his puppet pictures Marwan also executes this emanation on the 'dead thing', the doll. It is endowed with feelings whose expression also of the tangled limbs and the outspread folds of the robe is undisguisedly experiencable. And the surrounding also, rarely described in detail, is transformed into free painting without any nameable representational pretext of sentiment. With this Marwan manages to abolish the classical sculptural conflict between figure and ground in the autonomous colour-plastic pictorial spaciality. This takes place as a process of the identity between pictorial means, psychologically burdened, the human image and a painting freed from representation. (Jörn Merkert, Kadousch oder die Verwandlung - Fragmentarische Überlegungen zu Marwans Bilder, in: Timm Gierig (ed.), exhib.cat. Kunsthalle Darmstadt 1984, Berlin 1984, p. 16)