Tammam Azzam is a Syrian artist born in Damascus, Syria in 1980. He received his artistic training from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Damascus with a specialization in oil painting. Alongside a successful career as a painter in Syria, Azzam was a prolific graphic designer, an experience that would benefit him in his digital media work after relocating to Dubai in 2011, when the conflict started in Syria.
Azzams work deals directly with the ongoing conflict in his country. Often functioning as visual metaphors, his work includes ruins of buildings, bullet-riddled street signs, and digital and installation works portraying disasters of war. According to a statement the artist had said ‘The only thing that he can do as an artist is to try to make evocative and thoughtful images relating to what I have witnessed, in order to give the world a better understanding of the situation,”.
Recently, he started his work on ‘Storeys’, a series of monumental works on canvas illustrating magnitude of devastation experienced across his native country through expressionist compositions of destroyed cityscapes.
Azzams work has been exhibited in various international art exhibitions such as the FUU-Street Art Festival, Sarajevo in 2015, Vancouver Biennale, where he was in residence 2014, FotoFest Biennial, Houston 2014, Dak’Art: Biennial of Contemporary African Art, Dakar (2014) and many more.
Azzam currently lives and works in Delmenhorst, Germany.
