MARCUS JANSEN ‘TWO DECADES’ 2000-2019

curated by Terrence Sanders-Smith

DECADES 2000-2019 focuses on Marcus Jansens’s Modern Expressionism period. Note:  Modern Expressionism is an art movement and style that focuses on expressing emotional experience rather than physical reality.

"They gave me the feeling of seeing paintings that had leaped 100 to 150 years from the American style of the Ashcan school, i.e., Edward Hopper’s midnight pictures bathed in yellow light of a few patrons in a diner, very poetic. Marcus is the innovator of Modern Expressionism. What initiated it for him, was the graffiti on the sides of subway trains when he traveled from the Bronx to Manhattan to sell his work on the street. This is somewhat reminiscent of Jackson Pollock learning to kneel with the Hopi Indians and throw sand to make sand pictures. That innovation may have been the beginning of Abstract Expressionism." Jerome A. Donson - Art Historian and Former director of The American Vanguard Exhibitions, MOMA, New York, 1961.

“Marcus Jansen’s work brings you into an interpretation of yourself. Its depth makes you aware of your accountability as a human, a witness. What makes this series so important, valuable and impactful is his courage and fearlessness to speak truth to power.  As a curator this series of work from Marcus Jansen opened a lens into analyzing so many difficult moments in a not to distant history.”     -Terrence Sanders-Smith

Available are 30 limited edition prints (Edition of 3) by noted artist Marcus Jansen – in collaboration with SMITH contemporary. These works are from the Modern Expressionism period: 2000-2019 and are examples of Jansens’s hardening gaze of faces and bodies, including his own, marked by time and experience.

Biography:

Marcus Antonius Jansen b. 1968, in Manhattan, New York. Jerome A. Donson, director of traveling exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, compared Jansen's art to that of the socio-critical Ashcan School, and hailed him as the innovator of a modern expressionism. Jansen is best known for his faceless colonial, corporate criticism and his distorted landscape paintings.

For Marcus Antonius Jansen, rewriting history or at least re-examining it through his personal lens is central to his artistic practice. He understands that history is written by victors, and that valid dialogue in art history requires multiple perspectives. For the last 30 years, Jansen was heavily inspired in the early 1980’s by a graffiti writing from New York and has been later accredited to pioneering a raw, concentrated sense of immediacy in his socially critical and politically charged protest landscapes, Jansen first defiant works began to surface in his Military barracks he stayed in 1996 while stationed in Vilseck Germany and selling his work on Prince Street and Broadway in Manhattan, New York City in 1999 as part of the “Prince street kings” artists setting up on street corners in SOHO NYC.

His paintings function as autobiographical social, political, and economic commentaries, tackling themes such as urban gentrification, racial injustice, colonialism, capitalism, economic inequality, and psychological warfare. Through his work, history, iconography, and social mores collide.

Art Historian Manfred Schneckenburger, the only two-time Documenta Kassel director, called Jansen “One of the most Important American Painters of his generation." Critics have compared him to Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

Solo Exhibitions:

La Triennale di Milano Museum, Milan, the Museum Zitadelle Berlin and a major survey at The Baker Museum, Naples, FL, (Marcus Jansen Two Decades of Relevance) and at the Rollins Museum of Art, (Marcus Jansen E Pluribus Unum). He has participated in his first U.S. Museum invitational group show titled, Under/current/overview 8, at the Tampa Museum of Art in 2006, followed by the 12th International Print and Drawing Biennial in Taiwan at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art.

Private and Public Collections:

Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA), The Bunker Art Space in the Collection of Beth Ruin Dewoody, The Artistic Museum of Contemporary Art (AMOCA) Wales, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rollins Museum of Art, Baker Museum, Florida, The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, The Housatonic Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.