Tammam Azzam – Bilder ohne Namen
Dear Sir/Madam,
Galerie Kornfeld is pleased to present new works by Tammam Azzam on the occasion of Gallery Weekend 2021. The artist, who came to Germany in 2016 and moved to Berlin in 2018, paints contemporary pictures full of emotion that speak to the healing power of art.
Tammam Azzam’s paper collages and acrylic paintings have been “pictures without names” for twenty years. He leaves it to the beholder to interpret them. Are the works abstract? Or are they figurative, and if so, what do they show? Do they depict the destruction in Syria, a country that has been at war for ten years without the global community being able to find a solution? Or do they show his new home city of Berlin—a city that is always becoming and never simply is, and a city where the wounds and gaps left by the Second World War and the division of the city from 1945 to 1989 are still palpable?
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 us to think about ourselves and about the world in which we live. They pose questions, but they do not give answers. What we think, see, and feel is left up to us. Those who find references to the situation in Tammam Azzam’s home country are free to do so.
Tammam Azzam himself sees the events in Syria since 2011 as symbolic of the state of our world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He uses art to address the urgent questions of our time—war, violence, migration, destruction, and reconstruction—finding images that aim directly at our emotions and burn themselves into our memory.
His path took Tammam Azzam from Syria and Damascus via Dubai and Delmenhorst to Berlin, where he has been living and working with his family since 2018. Trained as a painter, his work comprises a wide range of techniques and styles. The reduced, almost abstract paintings of his early years were followed by photomontages in which, after his arrival in Dubai, the artist addressed the conflict in his home country directly.
Since arriving in Germany, he has been creating collage-like paintings consisting of up to 50,000 small, sometimes tiny paper fragments that he usually paints beforehand. These are assembled in several layers into abstract, mosaic-like representations of people, buildings, and structures. He is currently also working with acrylic painting, continuing—both formally and thematically—what he began in 2016 with his paper collages.
Tammam Azzam (born 1980 in Damascus, Syria) was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Institute for Advanced Study, in Delmenhorst in 2016 and has been living in Berlin since 2018.
His works are included in collections in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States and have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. (2021), the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and the Rudolf Stolz Museum in Sexten, South Tyrol, Italy (both 2020), Kunstverein Iserlohn “Villa Wessel” (2019), Ayyam Gallery, Dubai (2019 and 2016), the For-Site Foundation, San Francisco (2017 and 2016), and Stadtmuseum Oldenburg (2017). In 2021, together with artists such as Monica Bonvicini, Rebecca Horn, and Lawrence Weiner, he contributed a column to Stoa 169, the “Artist Columned Hall” in Polling, initiated by Bernd Zimmer.
Tammam Azzam has received numerous awards and prizes, most recently the Creative Activism Award from the Cultures of Resistance Network.
To mark the exhibition Bilder ohne Namen, a book will be published by Hirmer Verlag tracing Tammam Azzam’s artistic journey over 20 years: hardcover, 192 pages, over 120 colour illustrations, with essays by Avinoam Shalem, Mamuka Bliadze, and Regine Müller.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information, printable images, or to arrange an interview with the artist.
Yours sincerely,
Shahane Hakobyan and Tilman Treusch
