At Christie's in London, the painter Marwan as a stubborn observer of his peers

Since 2023, during the summer, Christie's London headquarters has ceased to be the site of auctions and instead hosted an exhibition. Like the two previous ones, this year's exhibition is dedicated to an artist from the Arab world: the Syrian painter Marwan Kassab Bachi, known as Marwan, born in Damascus in 1934 and died in Berlin in 2016. In 1993, he was shown at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, but has not been shown in a French museum since. The London exhibition allows us to take stock of a painter who is not yet as deeply inscribed in history as he should be: he constantly raised the question of human representation, challenging his position and taking the risk of misunderstanding.

To demonstrate this, Ridha Moumni, the exhibition's curator, has assembled nearly 150 works—canvases, drawings, and prints, as well as documents and letters—from private and public collections in the Middle East and Europe. There are so many that, although the Christie's building is of a respectable size, it was necessary to take advantage of all available space, along a route that runs from the ground floor to the first floor via corridors and staircases. This arrangement suits Marwan well, an artist of change and surprises.

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