Tammam Azzam

The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in New York and the first institutional presentation in the United States of Syrian-German artist Tammam Azzam. Bringing together paintings, collages, and works on paper, Tammam Azzam: A Horizon Remains focuses on a body of work centered on Azzam's sustained engagement with the city as landscape.

At a moment when images of the ruined city have become an increasingly familiar visual language, Azzam reimagines them through painting. Cities and urban forms accumulate, recede, and gradually open onto expansive terrains and distant horizons. Richly layered compositions invite the eye to move continuously across the surface, revealing cityscapes whose depth and complexity extend far beyond the images from which they emerge.

Whether shaped by war, natural disasters, or archaeological remains, Azzam’s works emerge from architectural fragments. Yet rather than documenting ruin, the artist begins with it, recognizing it as an enduring condition of the built environment and transforming the city into landscapes that speak as much to human making as to human unmaking.

Central to the exhibition are the artistic lineages informing Azzam's practice. Like his teacher, Marwan Kassab-Bachi, who repeatedly returned to his own face as a motif until it dissolved into landscape, Azzam revisits the city with similar persistence. Further developed during his years in Germany, this sustained investigation enters into dialogue with the traditions of postwar German painting.

Azzam constructs images in which accumulated fragments, expressive brushwork, color, and atmosphere cohere into a singular pictorial language. This exhibition positions Azzam within a broader contemporary return to the city not, simply as a subject to be depicted, but as a site through which the possibilities of painting continue to be reimagined.

Curated by Saria AlMidani

Managing curator: Zachary B. Feldman, Curator of Visual Arts & Programs at Goethe-Institut New York.

This exhibition was generously supported by Kornfeld Galerie Berlin and Ayyam Gallery Dubai.