Tammam Azzam Syria, b. 1980

Tammam Azzam (born 1980 in Damascus, Syria) grew up in the village of Ta'ara in the country’s south. He received his formal artistic training at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus, specialising in oil painting and graduating in 2001. From 2001 to 2003 he took part in advanced workshops in Amman, Jordan, led by the German Syrian painter Marwan Kassab Bachi. These sessions sharpened Azzam’s understanding of painting as a medium capable of carrying historical weight and emotional complexity. Alongside his studio practice, he worked as a graphic designer in Syria, a background that would later inform the visual precision and compositional clarity of his digital photomontage works.

Azzam’s practice is grounded in the relationship between places and their undoing: how architecture holds memory, and what remains when both are destroyed. Moving between painting, paper collage and mixed media, he returns consistently to themes of fragmentation, accumulation and the aesthetics of the unfinished. His landmark series The Syrian Museum (2012–2013) brought him international recognition by digitally superimposing canonical European paintings, including Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and works by Goya and Magritte, onto photographs of devastated Syrian buildings. Circulating widely online and in the press, these images generated sustained critical discussion around cultural memory and the Syrian conflict.

Since relocating to Germany in 2016, Azzam has developed an extensive body of collage works using prepared coloured paper, in which tearing, layering and reconstruction function as both method and metaphor. More recent paintings and collages examine the fragility of built environments and the slow accumulation of time on material surfaces, extending his inquiry into how loss is registered visually.

Azzam’s work is held in significant public and private collections across Europe, the Middle East and the United States. In 2016 he was a fellow at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Institute for Advanced Study, in Delmenhorst, Germany. His practice has been the subject of a major monograph, Bilder ohne Namen / Untitled Pictures, published by Hirmer Verlag in 2021.

His exhibition history spans continents and institutional contexts. Azzam has participated in the Vancouver Biennale, where he was artist in residence; the FotoFest Biennial in Houston; the Dak’Art Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Dakar; the Alexandria Biennale; the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana; and Banksy’s Dismaland in Weston super Mare (2015). Solo and group exhibitions have been presented at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto; the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. (2021); the Rudolf Stolz Museum in Sexten, South Tyrol (2020); the Busan Museum of Art; the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice; Framer Framed in Amsterdam; Columbia University in New York; the For Site Foundation in San Francisco; and the Künstlerforum Bonn, among many others.

Tammam Azzam has been represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin for many years, with the gallery providing a consistent platform for the development of his work. Solo and duo exhibitions at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin include Bilder ohne Namen / Untitled Pictures (2021), Temporary Title (2023–2024) and Fragments (2022), a duo exhibition with Jonas Englert in which Azzam’s large scale paper collages were shown in dialogue with Englert’s video works. The gallery has also presented Azzam’s work at international art fairs, including Art Dubai and Untitled Art in Miami Beach, contributing to his growing visibility within the global contemporary art context.

Azzam continues to live and work in Berlin, where his practice moves between the intimacy of paper collage and the monumental scale of painting, always returning to the question of what endures and what art can hold in the aftermath of loss.