SHANGHAI.- START Museum presents Syrian artist Safwan Dahoul’s first museum solo exhibition in Asia. The exhibition features a comprehensive overview of the artist’s sustained creative practice alongside an experimental medium that the artist has been working on for the past two years.

The exhibition features over 40 of Dahoul’s works, including many of his iconic large scale black-and-white portraits, as well as a series of experimental small-scale figurative works from his recent practice. This exhibition marks the artist’s first museum-level solo exhibition in China, as well as, the 20th case study of the museum’s ongoing Genealogy Study of Artists project.

Safwan Dahoul, one of the few internationally acclaimed contemporary artists from Syria, is also one of the most important and distinguished artists in the Arab world. He excels at using contrasts of light and shadow to create distorted and abstracted human forms. Throughout his artistic career spanning more than three decades, he has blended diverse artistic styles while maintaining his unique artistic qualities and characteristics. The artist projects his understanding of humanity, society, politics, and history into the context of “dreams”, using large-scale, hyper-close-up portraits to delve into the visual expression of alienation, solitude, and human desire.

The Genealogy Study of Artists project, initiated by START Museum in 2018, is an ongoing research project. It creatively establishes a sustained academic research platform focused on the interplay between an artist’s personal genealogy and their artistic creation, utilizing exhibitions, publications, sound documentation, visual materials, and historical litera- ture to systematically explore the artistic evolution of the featured artists.

Born in 1961 in Hama, Syria, Dahoul was initially trained by leading modernists at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Damascus before travelling to Belgium, where he earned a doctorate from the Higher Institute of Plastic Arts in Mons. Upon returning to Syria, he began teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts and was a prominent member of the Damascus art scene. In the span of a decade, Dahoul nurtured a new generation of artists as an active mentor whose evolving aesthetic often ignited new directions in painting. Given the trajectory and status of his painting style, Dahoul’s career is regarded as a crucial link between modern and contemporary Arab art.

Dahoul is mostly known for his beautiful melancholic and monochromatic works. Since the late 1980s, the artist began an ongoing body of work investigating the dream state. Simply entitled the Dream series, these works have explored the physical and psychological effects of alienation, solitude, and longing that punctuate the human experience at vari- ous stages in life.