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Marcus Antonius Jansen, (b. 1968, New York City), is a painter best known for his defaced “Faceless” portraits and gestural-provoking landscapes with studios based in Bronx, New York, and Fort Myers, Florida. “Avant-garde” has long described creatives who break aesthetic conventions. Yet its true origins lie in the battlefield. A French term meaning “the advanced guard,” these are the souls who brave the front lines, becoming first-hand witnesses to human devastation. In his life and work, artist Marcus Jansen occupies both senses of the phrase. An Army veteran who served in the Gulf War, he paints surreal landscapes and portraits that excavate conflict and conquest, as well as their casualties and underlying power structures. For the last three decades, with his early beginnings in 1999 as part of an artist group called "Prince Street Kings,." A movement of artists typically setting up in lower Manhattan selling art works from the corner of Prince Street and Broadway in New York City. Jansen has presented his audience with a mirror of society and a complete reexamination of our visual history in a new 21st century while disrupting one sided story's being told. Although his works seem especially timely now, it’s the last 25 years that Jansen has been noted as a pioneer by critics and historians alike. Emerging with socio-politically charged works at the very early part of a new economically challenged globalized era, Jansen disrupts both historically and painterly. |
Jansen participated in his first international Biennale in 2007, at the 12th International Print and Drawing Biennale, at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art in Taiwan. His first solo museum exhibition premiered at the La Triennale di Milano Museum, in Milan, Italy, as part of a European solo exhibition tour, organized by German Art Historian and curator, Prof Dr. Elmar Zorn. Jansen's first U.S. solo museum followed, highlighting his work at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018 and 2019, titled "Deconstructing Marcus Jansen," followed by his first U.S. solo Museum exhibitions, at the Rollins Museum of Art, in Winter Park, Florida, titled, "Marcus Jansen, E Pluribus Unum.," and The Baker Museum Artis-Naples, in Naples, Florida, titled "Marcus Jansen, Two Decades of Relevance." Public collections include The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Baker Museum, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, (MMOMA), The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rollins Museum of Art, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Foundation Calosa, The PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art and The Housatonic Museum of Art. |