GIACOMETTI / MARWAN OBSESSIONS
Institut Giacometti, Paris
21 October 2025 - 21 January 2026
In the coming autumn, Institut Giacometti in Paris will present the exhibition GIACOMETTI / MARWAN OBSESSIONS, an original encounter between two artists who, having chosen to work in a country different from their birth country - France and Germany respectively - questioned the issues around modernity from two different cultural spaces: Europe and the Middle-East. Alberto Giacometti and MARWAN turned the representation of the head into the core of an enduring research that established their position as artists. This exhibition, the first joint presentation of their works, proposes a trail in which surrealism and MARWAN’s first works (1962-1972), drawings, large heads and sculpted portraits, echo one another, asserting a strong connection between visual art research and reflection on the human.
Marwan Kassab-Bachi, called MARWAN, was born in Damascus in 1934. After having studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus, determined to embrace an artistic career, politically committed and highly conscious of the mutations taking place in his country following colonialism, he settled in 1957 in Berlin, the epicentre of the Cold War. Like Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck, also students at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst in Berlin, he chose figuration, breaking from the informal art dominating West-Germany at the time. For him, it was not a position from which to confront the traumas of recent European history but a theatre for the intimate.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Giacometti also resisted the attraction of informal abstraction, reiterating his commitment to figuration and the representation of the human. From 1919, and even more from 1935, when he returned to working with a model, it was on heads that were focused his questioning on the perception of reality.
From 1985 to his death in 2016, MARWAN took Heads as his sole subject. Before that, after he arrived in Berlin in 1957, his first works (1962-1972) were portraits and intimate scenes, whose framing and execution express the challenges of being alive that echo Giacometti’s works like Mother and daughter, The Cage and Walking Woman from 1932.
From 1964 and 1972, MARWAN’s first works were focused on figures with deformed bodies, “portraits” of icons of Arab modernity: the Iraqi poet Bader Chaker al Sayyab, the political thinker Munif al-Razzaz, both exiled from their country, persecuted for their ideas. All seem to be suffused with a strange melancholy.
His year as artist in residence at la Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 1973, marked a break. He began a new series of large format paintings in which heads, painted in broad sinuous touches size up the visitors.
MARWAN linked those Heads-landscapes to the outlines and colours of the Syrian countryside. With the still life and puppets coming after, he continued to experiment with colour while placing the human at distance. From 1983, he went back to tall Heads, endowed with a cosmic character, covering the totality of the support, a series uninterrupted till his death.
MARWAN worked little with models, and his huge Heads have the quality of apparitions. They are strangely close to Giacometti’s post-war plasters and bronzes, remarkable for their spiky matter. Like those, the Heads emerge from a profusion of touches, marks that create their own space and in which only the eyes and a wide red mouth, like a horizontal stroke, arise. Clay, plaster, drawings, paintings, all the mediums Giacometti used embody his intense and involved attention to the model. From the study of his close relatives, his wife Annette and his brother Diego, to the large heads in plaster from the beginning of the 1960s, Giacometti kept, even in his work from memory, the reminiscence of the face-to-face with the model. In this observation, there’s no realist purpose, but the manifestation of a gesture repeated, at times erased and absolutely necessary that grounds the existence of the artist as a human being. Here too Giacometti and MARWAN connect.
Curator: Françoise Cohen
Catalogue under the direction of Françoise Cohen, exhibition curator
Co-edited by Fondation Giacometti, Paris / Fage éditions, Lyon
Bilingual French / English, 122 pages, 16.5 x 2.5 cm
Texts by Françoise Cohen and Rasha Salti
A not previously published interview of MARWAN by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Unpublished extracts of the artist’s journal
INSTITUT GIACOMETTI
5 rue Victor-Schoelcher, 75014 Paris
