Published by the Ministry of Culture & Information, Iraq, this catalogue documents Marwan Kassab-Bachi’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad in 1980. It brings together a body of work centred on the “head” – not as portrait, but as a sustained painterly inquiry into structure, density, and interiority.

Marwan’s images unfold through layering and repetition, where the face becomes a field rather than a likeness. Built through accumulation, erosion, and reworking, these works hold a tension between presence and dissolution. The line does not describe – it presses, insists, returns.

The catalogue stands as a document of a specific cultural moment: a Berlin-based artist exhibiting in Baghdad at the threshold of geopolitical rupture. As such, it carries not only the works themselves, but also the conditions of their appearance – a passage between artistic contexts that would soon be radically altered.

Details
Publisher: Ministry of Culture & Information, Iraq
Type: Exhibition catalogue
Year: 1980

See also
Marwan Kassab-Bachi and the question of the head in postwar painting