Working in the postwar period in Germany, where he emigrated from Syria in 1957 to attend art school, Marwan used figuration to memorialize activists, artists, and friends. “I paint souls,” he once declared. Here, the artist depicts the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab soon after his death in 1964. Sayyab, a widely acknowledged innovator in contemporary Arabic poetry, was exiled for his anti-government protests in 1952. With his pale face rendered from a rich mix of blended color, the poet seems trapped in a too-narrow chair, and is flanked by two disembodied arms. They hold an unidentifiable rectangular shape above his head, forming the “cross” of the painting’s title, perhaps a suggestion of martyrdom.
420: Picturing History, 2026
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Picturing History
Gallery 420Her response to this omission was to create American People Series #20: Die. For the mural-sized painting, Ringgold depicted contemporary events using a figurative visual language—at a time when the art world celebrated abstraction.
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