Admirers and connoisseurs of Marwan’s work only know his early works from the sixties - through his work on canvas. In this exhibition, however; you will see the sketches he drew on paper and card board using pencil and chalk. The sketches are seen as experimental, or definitely explorative works on paper, the watercolors, ink and pencil drawings. These works have not been exhibited up until now. The artist himself had forgotten them for decades. Just some years ago he re-discovered them in a cabinet of drawings. What he found has been even for him astonishing in its variety and richness: a surge of hasty notations, complex ideas of drawings and a nearly absurd, bizarre invention of figures. The sketches still maintain their original fervid expression of rage, of pain in silent melancholy and of angry happiness.

These works open our eyes on the struggle between the original images of the world. The objective and figurative forms of expressions, for instance, is seen to be free from all dominating paternalism which is domineering physical abstract paintings. This approach can be compared to that of his colleagues Eugen Schoenbeck and Georg Baselitz, as they acted in a similar way.

Unlike many of his colleagues in the sixties who adhered to abstract expressionism in the early sixties and seventies, hence the idea of “l’art pour l’art” Art for Art sake, Marwan was not satisfied by this concept of art. Towards the end of his study, he tried to connect the knowledge of abstract expression, which he got through his teacher Hann Trier, with his own interpretation of the world: he addressed abstract but figurative themes that reflected its internal struggle.

(German text by Jorn Merkert)
Translated into English by Alia Rayyan

Note: In 1998 Marwan Qassab Bashi presented to Birzeit University a gift of 75 of his works under the title " To the Children of Palestine". These works are now in the Art Collection of the University's Ethnographic and Art Museum.