Tammam Azzam

The medium of collage seems eerily appropriate for Tammam Azzam’s cryptic, hypnotic images of fragmented cityscapes. Torn pieces of paper—wrinkled tissue, newsprint, even wallpaper—are adhered to canvas or board and combined, at times, with rapid strokes of paint, creating the illusion of crumbling buildings and desolate vistas of rubble. In 2011, Azzam, already a successful painter and graphic designer in his early thirties, was forced to flee Syria with his family, settling eventually in Berlin. Since the start of his exile, his practice has moved from propagandistic digital works featuring Western masterpieces superimposed on ruins to monumental paintings of destroyed sites based on news photographs. Devastation fills the frames.