Tammam Azzam – Aftermath

With Aftermath, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presents Tammam Azzam’s fourth solo exhibition. The show features a new series of watercolors that explore destruction and its lasting traces.

Azzam'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.

In 2018, the Berlin-based painter Tammam Azzam made his gallery debut in Germany at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin. In November 2023, the gallery hosted his third solo exhibition. Meanwhile, in Azzam’s native Syria, something occurred that had long seemed unimaginable. Only a few months ago, the oppressive regime was overthrown. The consequences and aftereffects remain entirely unforeseeable. For more than half a century, the Assad family had claimed and brutally enforced its rule over Syria. The country, torn apart from within, is deeply traumatised. It is time to take a closer look at the work of destruction for which the Assad regime is responsible, but also to rethink the future—the day after the slaughter.

Azzam has titled his fourth solo exhibition at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin Aftermath. The gallery represents him exclusively in Europe. In this exhibition, the Syrian-born artist presents a curated selection of works from a thematically focused series of watercolours that he has been working on for approximately two years. These works appear to address Assad’s crimes and the systematic deprivation of the Syrian population’s means of existence. Azzam depicts bombed-out buildings and vast city districts reduced to rubble, portraying them as skeletal remains.

Set against an ominous firmament—painted in fiery hues of red and orange, as well as deep blacks and blues—the cityscapes often appear toppled, fragmented, and labyrinthine. To Western viewers, this may evoke the impression of a traditional medina: a maze of narrow alleys where orientation is quickly lost. Yet this sense of helplessness pales in comparison to that experienced by Syrians confronted with the sight of their ruined, deliberately destroyed homes and lives.

Azzam interprets cityscapes as spaces of death. While parts of his compositions verge on informal abstraction, he maintains a faint architectural structure. His focus is on built environments; people are absent. Residential blocks feature blind blue windowpanes alongside gaping black holes—the marks of war. Fractured surfaces recall craquelure in ceramics or oil paintings. A constant theme emerges: something here is utterly dysfunctional, though it was once whole. “I reflect on the relationship between cities and people, and how spaces that were once full of life become silent voids,” Azzam says.

At the same time, Azzam does not focus solely on the consequences of war in Syria but addresses the impact of war in a broader sense. While earlier works dealt more directly with his homeland, this recent watercolour series sheds light on the current state of the world. He cites scenes of destruction and the traces of war that have accumulated in collective visual memory—particularly those from the Gaza Strip—as inspiration. Syria, which Azzam has now visited for the first time in 14 years, serves as a symbolic protagonist. He views its devastation as “part of a larger human tragedy that repeats itself in different places across the world.” He concludes: “Destruction has become a universal colour.”

Watercolour has long been a fundamental medium for Azzam. Over the past three years, he has engaged with it with particular intensity. Many works, with their pronounced linearity and sketch-like quality, verge on drawing. Against opaque skies filled with smoke or abstracted infernos, his exhausted urban structures—set against stark white ground—take on a ghostly, unreal presence. Fragile architectures are reduced to skeletons, and every red stain may signify a pool of blood.

— Dorothee Baer-Bogenschütz

Tammam Azzam, born in Damascus in 1980, lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting, in Damascus in 2001. In 2016, he moved to Germany. His works have been exhibited in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, including at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai, Art Dubai, and Untitled Miami, as well as at Haines Gallery San Francisco, which successfully presented him at the Armory Show in New York in 2018. Azzam’s works are held in esteemed institutions such as the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, the Atassi Foundation, and the For Site Foundation in San Francisco.