Galerie Claude Lemand

BOUTROS AL-MAARI - Wâ Habîbati !
___

 Boutros Al-Maari.

“ Wâ Habîbati - O my Love is the title of one of my recent paint­ings: a man car­ries his daughter in his arms. The little one has only one shoe, the other has fallen. This is one of the sad sto­ries of the people of our country. The father car­ries the corpse of his daughter in his arms, and from the depths of the dark­ness behind him appear two hands, sim­ilar to those of the Crucified… The same Syrian cru­ci­fied two thou­sand years ago is cru­ci­fied again. As his mother Maryam had mourned him, he now mourns his daughter, his beloved, Syria. Hence the title of the exhi­bi­tion SYRIA MY LOVE. I also placed in the painting the figure of a woman that I bor­rowed from Picasso’s Guernica, to clearly indi­cate that human pain is the same, every­where and always. (Boutros Al-Maari, Hamburg, October 2019)

 Born in Damascus in 1968, Boutros Al-Maari holds a degree in graphic arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Damascus, a master’s degree in Social Anthropology from EHESS Paris in 1999, then a doc­torate in 2006 on the emer­gence of modern painting in Syria. Professor in the same Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus from 2008 to 2012. The war in Syria forced him into exile. He has lived and worked in Hamburg since 2012.