Lot 645 D

With his faces, Marwan succeeded in designing a pictorial architecture of the head that forcefully exposed the deep emotions of the depicted. Delicately yet at the same time pow erfully, he mirrors a landscape of the soul and thus creates a very personal form of portrait painting.

“In this way the heads by Marwan evoke the image of people who are the complete opposite of the advertising faces broadcasted to each and everyone of us on a daily basis, whose true guise is faded over with the cheap pretence of artificial beauty. Contrary to this deluge of streamlined, over-powdered, retouched, pixelled-away body worlds of advertising images bereft of all life, Marwan's faces recount the deeply embedded traces of experience, the silent shimmer of shame, the inner conflict, manifold break-ups, desperation, the mild pain of longing, the loneliness in the midst of abundance, the maturity, the experience and deep realisation that man's entire stature originates from and is sustained by all this.” (Guido Faßbender, Die Dunkelkammer der Gestalt, in: Jörn Merkert (ed.) Marwan, exhib. cat. Museum of Modern Art Bagdad 1980, Berlin 1980, p.111)