Tammam Azzam, Syrian artist
Born in Damascus, Syria in 1980
Resides currently in Germany
Tammam Azzam trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, specialising in oil painting. Forced to flee the war, he left Syria for Dubai in 2011, and has lived and worked in Germany since 2015.
The artist has been invited to numerous monographic and collective exhibitions, including at the Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (Slovenia, 2013), and the Ayyam Gallery in Beirut (2013), London (2013), Dubai (2012, 2009) and Damascus (2010). In 2014, Tammam Azzam participated in FotoFest in Houston, Texas. “Syrian artist Tammam Azzam has created a hybrid form of painting” is how the Ayyam Gallery describes him, thanks to the use of various media, which enable “interactions between the surface and form, which enter into dialogue as the compositions evolve.” During the summer of 2015, he attracted the attention of street artist Banksy, and was invited to his Dismaland exhibition at Weston-Super-Mare in western England.
Tammam Azzam experiments with different media, enabling the creation of a “hybrid form”, which borrows just as much as it multiplies and evolves. His recent work thus use digital media and references from art history to examine the political and social upheavals in Syria, and the cycles of violence and destruction ravaging his country. He reinvests several iconic symbols in a poignant reflection on his country’s situation in the face of the world’s negligence.
Tammam Azzam regularly posts his digital images, inspired by global iconography (mediatised images, references to art history, etc.) on social networks. In his Syrian Museum series, he contrasts images prevalent in Western culture with those from Syrian reality, examining our vision of current affairs and questioning art’s role.
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