Dr. Boutros Al Maari

Biography

Born in Damascus in 1968, and currently lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. Al-Maari graduated with a printmaking degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus in 1991, where he taught for several years, and obtained his Ph.D. in social anthropology from the École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2006. From 2008 to 2012 he worked as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University. After having resided for many years in France, he has relocated in Hamburg, Germany. The sights and sounds of the souks and tea houses of Damascus were his early inspiration.

The continuous compositional presence of the tarbouche and the narghile water pipe reflects the artist’s interest in folk and traditional life, and is a recurring component within Al Maari’s images. As well as being a prolific painter, Al Maari is a writer and illustrator of several books published in Arabic, French and recently in German.