With a constantly evolving method, Tammam Azzam recalls the beauty of his native Syria, rebuilding its broken pieces with complex techniques. Marina Iordan assesses what places him at the forefront of contemporary Arab art.
Tammam Azzam’s increasingly abstract mixed-media works, in all their depth and textural intricacies, narrate stories of his homeland, both before and after the uprising. With assemblages of found objects, digital works and, more recently, a renewed interest in painting, he tells his pain, isolation and helplessness in the face of the current Syrian conflict. Born in 1980, he began his relationship with art in his childhood years, toying with watercolours and paper. From the age of 15 it was very clear in his mind that he would be an artist. “It was my dream,” he recalls. “This, and nothing else. My childhood in the south of Syria was a culturally bleak one, without books or Internet. I had never seen Damascus.”
