A leading figure on the contemporary Arab art scene, Marwan is appreciated for his figurative work, in particular for the concept of “face-landscape”, a term coined by the Syrian poet Adonis. 

Born in Damascus, Marwan studied Arabic literature before moving to Germany at the age of 23. In Berlin, he studied painting at the Hochschule der Bildende Künste and discovered Expressionism through his teacher Hann Trier. In the 1960s, alongside the German painter Georg Baselitz, he took part in the New Figuration movement, which sought to establish a ‘third way’ in the face of the two hegemonic pictorial trends, abstraction and new realism.  

From the 1970s onwards, he embarked on a repetitive, or archaeological exploration of the human head, which became a subject in its own right, seen as a constantly renewed landscape. Very soon it was his own face that became the focus of his experimentation. Using a small but powerful palette, a free and nervous touch, and accommodating both small and monumental formats, Marwan has left an astonishing record of an obsessive quest for the human soul. 

Marwan's work can be seen in all major museums, including the Tate Modern (London), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Städel Museum (Frankfurt), the Guggenheim (Abu Dhabi), the Barjeel Art Foundation Collection, Darat al Funun (Amman) and many others. 

Born in 1981 in Swaida el-Kafer in Syria, Nagham Hodaifa has lived and worked in France since 2005. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus University before embarking on a course in art history at the Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, where she defended her thesis on Marwan Kassab Bachi, which she published in 2018 under the title Marwan, face à face.

The central theme of Hodaifa’s work is the human condition, which she explores through the representation of the body. The body, anonymous, stripped or draped, whole or fragmentary, is sometimes transformed into a landscape and becomes a geography of the intimate.

On small-format paper or monumental canvases, Hodaifa's painting expresses an ardour and freedom that unfold in vibrant colours. The pigments, ground in the studio using the old-fashioned way, are dominated by greens (duck green, bluish green, emerald green, English green, Veronese green, and others), sometimes balanced by flamboyant reds and golds. It's a thick material that covers the canvas, deposited energetically, in a body to body relationship with the paint. It's a hand-to-hand relationship that is also expressed in performance paintings, in which Hodaifa surrounds herself with musicians, dancers, poets, singers or video artists... as in 2019, when she created two performances for the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, entitled The Night Attire and Mirage... Sarâb.