BIOGRAPHY
Marcus Antonius Jansen b.1968, in Manhattan, East Harlem, New York. For 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 the victors, and that valid dialogue in art history requires multiple perspectives, especially those of black and brown voices who have often been excluded in the discourse of Art History. His subject matter is deeply rooted in formative experiences in both his native Bronx, New York and Moenchengladbach Germany, where he grappled with social upheaval and racism as well as his world travels in his youth. Growing up in the racial and economic paradoxes of the 1970s and 80' in both countries, Jansen absorbed impressions that remain hallmarks of his expressionist style, bridging two worlds with empathy and irony. Graffiti writing, which he discovered as a teenager, taught him to distort and deconstruct traditional paradigms while imagining new ones.
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. Born to a Jamaican Mother and later raised by a German father who was a businessman and Historian, Jansen spent his early years in Bronx and Laurelton Queens New York, in largely Caribbean / immigrant communities. His first exposure to the art world came when a lion he painted in elementary school was exhibited at Lever House in Manhattan at age six. In the late 1970s, the family relocated to Germany. There, in a post War Germany, Jansen attended an all German school, where he was the only child of color. The racism and harassment he endured contributed to his independent character and later became fuel for his art. Returning to the Bronx in 1982, at the height of the hip-hop movement, Jansen was swept into the energy of graffiti culture. Though just 14 years old, he later made contact with pioneer graffiti writer WEST from Manhattan. With a bifocal vision of a crack-ridden New York and a relatively orderly German culture, Jansen began probing the forces of disharmony shaping the U.S. His paintings often feature faceless figures in urban landscapes men in business suits, colonialist archetypes, and other characters that shift with global events. His aerial perspectives, meanwhile, were shaped by his experiences in the U.S. Army, where he was stationed in Germany, South Korea, and the Middle East during the first Gulf War at just 21.
After confronting the realities of surveillance, violence, and the military-industrial complex, Jansen was hospitalized at Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., where he was diagnosed with PTSD. Art therapy became his outlet and, ultimately, his calling. He began modestly, painting sun rays on cardboard to sell on street corners. Today, Jansen works on monumental canvases using house paint, acrylics, and oil stick at his studios in Fort Myers, Florida, and the Bronx. 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, and filmmaker John Scoular profiled him in the documentary Marcus Jansen - Examine and Report.
One of his earliest influences, Robert Rauschenberg, provides a striking coincidence: Jansen lives a short distance from Rauschenberg’s former residence and studio on Captiva Island. He exhibited alongside Rauschenberg in group shows at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018 and the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in 2004 after meeting Rauschenberg. For 30 years now, Jansen has pioneered a raw, concentrated sense of immediacy in his socially critical and politically charged protest landscapes, Jansen first defiant works that began to surface in his Military barracks he stayed in 1996 while stationed in Vilseck Germany. Through his nonprofit Marcus Jansen Foundation, he supports low-income community organizations in Southwest Florida and abroad, promotes cultural awareness through art and music, and assists mental health organizations through creative expression. PAINTINGS
Marcus Antonius Jansen was discovered by one of the major connoisseurs of Abstract Expressionism in America. Jerome A. Donson, director of traveling exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, compared Jansens art to that of the socio-critical Ashcan School, and hailed him as the innovator of a modern expressionism (See Modern Urban Expressionism; The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen, 2006). Jansen is best known for his faceless colonial and corporate criticism and his distorted landscape paintings. A former soldier, Jansen was born in New York City in and later moved to Germany where he was educated. In 1999, he returned to his native New York and started selling his paintings on Prince Street and Broadway on street corners as part of the often referred to “Princestreetkings” in lower Manhattan.
Pointing to the Ashcan School, founded in New York in 1904 by painters from Philadelphia such as Maurice Prendergast, Donson highlighted the social criticism in Jansens work and with the term Expressionism he referred to the distinctive abstract components of his paintings and installations. Abstract Expressionism was neither a style nor the result of a manifesto; it was rather the consensus of a modern artistic approach in America after 1945, characterized by the fact that painting had abandoned representation in favor of purely abstract picture painting, as seen for example in works like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and many others. Photo: Rollins Museum of Art, 2020 |
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Faceless Colonialist's series, Hypnotic Spells, 2024
Their aim was to create works of art that, without imagery and without any influences from the outside world, dealt both with the painting as painting and with the momentary emotional or intellectual state of the given painter. In Marcus Jansens “Urban expressionism” the canvas as painted abstraction is also the support for pictorial information from the external world. The canvas becomes the promulgator of urban social, surreal visions of the world. It takes up the reality of the artist's worlds: it formulates a critical artistic approach.
As his artistic idiom Jansen has created a personal pictorial alphabet that repeatedly appears in his various paintings or installations. The automobile tire, which can also be replaced by a life preserver, refers to trash, disposal, safety. Speed. Travel, dangers, technology- without any need for the artist to worry about rolling resistance of efficient-risk, blowouts, transportations, provisions and many other aspects of everyday life. In this way Jansen avoids the constraints of the precise representation of Hyperrealism or hyperrealism. He utilizes the actual presence of objects by integrating them into his work as Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, yet in the painting they elude logical explanation. Jansen insists on the freedom of being subjective, to breach the social expectation of a fixed cannon. The objects experience the freedom of subjectivity in the work of art so that abstraction breaks into realism and reality, in turn becomes abstract. 
Aerial Views series, Puzzling Wars of the World, 2013
The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art became Jansens first U.S. museum solo spotlight , titled Deconstructing Marcus Jansen that was a show that investigated the stylistic techniques of painter Marcus Jansen and placed him in dialogue with Robert Rauschenberg, William de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, David Smith, John Steuart Curry, Jim Dine, and Romare Bearden. Deconstructing Marcus Jansen was the fourth in a series of exhibitions—following Francis Bacon (2013), Robert Mangold (2016), and Louise Nevelson (2018)—that focus on the style, themes, and history of individual artists within the Kemper Museum Permanent Collection.
The Deconstructing series provides opportunities for meditations on the interconnectedness of artists and works of art in the Permanent Collection. Deconstructing Marcus Jansen was curated by Jade Powers, assistant curator at Kemper Museum. 
Almine Rech, Art Basel, Miami Beach, Convention Center, 2024Jansen has held solo museum exhibitions internationally, including at 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. Jansen has exhibited alongside many of his contemporaries from the 20th and 21st century in curated group exhibitions that included, George Condo, Kenny Sharf, Banksy, Willem Dekooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Markus Lupertz, Shepard Fairy, Rashid Johnson, JR, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Ron English, and Romare Bearden.
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