Tammam Azzam Syria, b. 1980

Tammam Azzam’s solo exhibition Aftermath features a new series of watercolors that explore destruction and its lasting traces. The artist's work focuses on urban landscapes that have been disfigured by war and violence. His cityscapes appear as fragile skeletons, ruins of once-vibrant places. With delicate lines and striking color accents, he creates compelling compositions that reflect not only Syria but also the universal consequences of armed conflict. Balancing documentary precision with painterly abstraction, his works reveal the scars of destruction and the silence that follows.
Photos by Andrea Katheder

We are pleased to present new works by Syrian artist Tammam Azzam, Berlin-based, in the exhibition “Temporary Title”. Guided by a universal humanity, his pictorial collages find artistic expression for the unrelenting suffering that people experience through unexpected attacks or wars by tyrannical rulers in the past, present and future. Creativity in the midst of fragmentation. The English expression “temporary title”, with which the artist titled his exhibition, is one meaning of the Arabic expression “al-‘unwan al-mu’aqqat”. The phrase also translates to “temporary address“, referring to the homelessness experienced by people who have been forced to leave their homes due to terror, war or famine.

Galerie Kornfeld is pleased to present the works of Tammam Azzam and Jonas Englert in the duo exhibition “Fragments”. Both artists dwell on the rebuild or the re-contextualisation of political moments through history.
The exhibition challenges the way political decisions are made and the outcome of them. How these settlements, arrangements, threats, treaties and agreements take place and how they are definitive in the change of history, how they impact not only the current population but generations to come, and to question the authenticity of the diplomatic gestures that lead to defining moments in our times.
Through both artists exhibited we can sense how society deals with political agreements, disagreements and decisions being done. In Englert’s work we see this through fragments of video compositions showcasing the diplomacy of political gestures whereas in Azzam’s work we see this through large-scale paper collages that depict the broken end result of a conflict or dispute.

Tammam Azzam, Elvira Bach, Stéphane Couturier, Nick Dawes, Paris Giachoustidis, Hubertus Hamm, Natela Iankoshvili, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Franziska Klotz, Tamara Kvesitadze, Christopher Lehmpfuhl, David Meskhi, Susanne Roewer, Hubert Scheibl, Martin Spengler, Jan Tichy, Ivana de Vivanco
Galerie Kornfeld is delighted to announce it's ten year anniversary exhibition, wich will feature the artists that have come along with us through the decade. The anniversary exhibition will reveal touching glimpses of the past and the future, sensitive and exciting exchanges between first artistic attempts and more mature works. The works on show hint at inner struggle and transformation, the eternal search for what is hidden behind the visible.

An aesthetic experience is not an appeal, and a picture is not political agitation. But l’art pour l’art, art just for art’s sake, is not enough for Tammam Azzam. His works inspire usto think about ourselves and about the world in which we live. They pose questions, but they don’t give any answers. What we think, see, feel is left upto us. Those who find references to the situation in Tammam Azzam’s homecountry are free to do so. Tammam Azzam himself sees the events in Syria since 2011 as symbolic for the state of our world at the beginning of thetwenty-first century. He uses art to address the urgent questions of our times, such as war, violence, migration, destruction, and construction; finding images that aim directly at our emotions and burn themselves into our memory.

Hiba Alansari, Tammam Azzam, Stéphane Couturier, Nick Dawes, Farshad Farzankia, Hubertus Hamm, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Vera Pagava
Shutdown. Lockdown. Confirmations. Cancellations.
That might happen from time to time, the gallerist thinks. Occasionally an artist or a collector might cancel. This time, however, it's a collective, worldwide cancellation. And he tries to understand current events, just as the friends of art seek to read and interpret images. And the gallerist thinks. Cancel? Confirm? He thinks: These extraordinary times offer us the opportunity to pause momentarily, to reflect on what really matters, to feel what is taking place and to become aware of the consequences. At least from time to time.

Tammam Azzam first gained attention in 2013 when he was forced to leave his studio in Syria and began making digital photomontages in his new home in Dubai. These works take an unromantic look at the conflict within art making in the face of war and violence, directly addressing the on-going conflict in his home country. One of these works shows an image of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” superimposed on a bombed Syrian building . This work went viral on Social Media, and even today is among the most well known works of the artist.
Following these experiences, Tammam Azzam found his way back to painting, but in a different register. With “Storeys”, a series of monumental acrylic paintings depicting the magnitude of devastation in his home country through expressionist compositions of destroyed cityscapes, the artist chronicles the current state of his country in a cathartic exercise of reconstruction, storey by storey.