Photo: Marcus Jansen - E Pluribus Unum, Rollins Museum of Art, 2020
STATEMENTS
"As we spoke to the artist, Marcus Antonius Jansen, I told him I believed he was the originator of a new movement which I called “Urban Expressionism” and that I believed that there will be many followers in this new style. But there will only be one Marcus Jansen."
Art Historian, Curator Jerome A Donson, Director of the American Vanguard Exhibitions, 1961.
Catalog: Modern Urban- Expressionism, The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen 2006
"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."
Art Historian, Curator of the American Vanguard Exhibitions, Action Painters, 1961 (US)
Catalog: Modern Urban- Expressionism, The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen 2006
"As we spoke to the artist, Marcus Antonius Jansen, I told him I believed he was the originator of a new movement which I called “Urban Expressionism” and that I believed that there will be many followers in this new style. But there will only be one Marcus Jansen."
Art Historian, Curator Jerome A Donson, Director of the American Vanguard Exhibitions, 1961.
Catalog: Modern Urban- Expressionism, The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen 2006
"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."
Art Historian, Curator of the American Vanguard Exhibitions, Action Painters, 1961 (US)
Catalog: Modern Urban- Expressionism, The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen 2006
“The American myth needs to be reexamined in the twenty-first century, even rewritten. One of the most important contributions in this regard is being produced by the American Marcus Jansen. With Caribbean and German roots, he is a painter through and through, a painting diagnostician with a gaze as comprehensive as it is incisive. He radically disposes of the early American myth of undeviating progress. His results are disconcerting, and they can be frightening.”
Art Critic, Prof Dr Manfred Schneckenburger (Germany)
Two Time Documenta Kassel curator 1977/87.
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017
"Marcus Jansen is certainly - and I know what I am saying - one of the most important American artists of our time“.
Art Critic, Prof. Dr. Manfred Schneckenburger (Germany)
Two Time Documenta Kassel 1977 and 1987 Curator
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017
“Jansen’s opinions about the elites in a repressive system are as comprehensive as they are scathing, opinions that he clearly expresses in his entire oeuvre.”
Art Critic, Prof. Dr. Manfred Schneckenburger (Germany)
Two Time Documenta Kassel 1977 and 1987 Curator
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017
“In the manner of the Pop Art of Robert Rauschenberg and the graffiti art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jansen has developed his own signature.”
Art Historian, Curator, Dr. Elmar Zorn (Germany)
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017
“Jansen suggests a future in which all of the creature comforts that we take for granted may end up collapsing before our eyes.”
Art Historian and Curator Dan Cameron, Former director of the US Biennale, 2010 (US)
New American Paintings No. 94 2011
“For Jansen, then, the only salvation, possibility of action exists as a painterly and persistent engagement: to take seriously the invocation of conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth above: “Artists have a special responsibility […] it is always a political act.”
Art Historian, Curator, Dr. Brooke Lynn Mcgowan (US)
New York writer and Curator / Examine and Report Documentary
Monograph: Marcus Jansen DECADE, Skira Editore Milan Italy 2016
“For Jansen, then, the only salvation, possibility of action exists as a painterly and persistent engagement: to take seriously the invocation of conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth above: “Artists have a special responsibility […] it is always a political act.”
Art Historian, Curator, Dr. Brooke Lynn Mcgowan (US)
New York writer and Curator / Examine and Report Documentary
Monograph: Marcus Jansen DECADE, Skira Editore Milan Italy 2016
“From Robert Henri, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jansen is an american, or better a newyorker, to the marrow. I think he represents, together with british artists Cecily Brown and Peter Doig, the best part of the great contemporary art, that is rising, in terms of criticism, audience.”
Art Critic, Writer. Paola Manazza Founder of Artslife.com, Milan, Italy
Monograph: Marcus Jansen DECADE, Skira Editore Milan Italy 2016
“From Robert Henri, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jansen is an american, or better a newyorker, to the marrow. I think he represents, together with british artists Cecily Brown and Peter Doig, the best part of the great contemporary art, that is rising, in terms of criticism, audience.”
Art Critic, Writer. Paola Manazza Founder of Artslife.com, Milan, Italy
Monograph: Marcus Jansen DECADE, Skira Editore Milan Italy 2016
"The works presented In the Land of the Silhouettes offer glimpses into the fluid and uncensored imagination of one of the most exciting artists at work today. Jansen’s challenging and paradoxical silhouette paintings take us into worlds of power and possibility that transcend time and place and ask us to recognize aspects of our own experiences. His works are full of perceptions—not judgements—that offer opportunities to think freely and deeply about the forces that surround our lives and actions."
Art Historian, Dr. John Seed (US)
Writer and Art Historian 2023
"The works presented In the Land of the Silhouettes offer glimpses into the fluid and uncensored imagination of one of the most exciting artists at work today. Jansen’s challenging and paradoxical silhouette paintings take us into worlds of power and possibility that transcend time and place and ask us to recognize aspects of our own experiences. His works are full of perceptions—not judgements—that offer opportunities to think freely and deeply about the forces that surround our lives and actions."
Art Historian, Dr. John Seed (US)
Writer and Art Historian 2023
“The painter manages to combine the gestural and coloristic freedoms of abstract painting with the literal eloquence and crafts manly precision of naturalistic depictions. Indeed, thanks to the contrapuntal juxtaposition of these two opposing artistic principles, the effects of both the abstract and the objective elements are considerably.”
Dr. Gottfried Knapp (Germany)
Senior Art Critic at Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munih, Germany
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017
“The painter manages to combine the gestural and coloristic freedoms of abstract painting with the literal eloquence and crafts manly precision of naturalistic depictions. Indeed, thanks to the contrapuntal juxtaposition of these two opposing artistic principles, the effects of both the abstract and the objective elements are considerably.”
Dr. Gottfried Knapp (Germany)
Senior Art Critic at Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munih, Germany
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017
“Jansen insists on the freedom to be subjective, to breach the social expectation of a fixed canon. The objects experience the freedom of subjectivity in the work of art, so that abstraction breaks into realism and reality, in turn, becomes abstract.”
Art Historian, Dr. Dieter Ronte (Germany)
Former Museum Director of Kunst Museum Bonn, Germany
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017
“Jansen insists on the freedom to be subjective, to breach the social expectation of a fixed canon. The objects experience the freedom of subjectivity in the work of art, so that abstraction breaks into realism and reality, in turn, becomes abstract.”
Art Historian, Dr. Dieter Ronte (Germany)
Former Museum Director of Kunst Museum Bonn, Germany
Monograph: Aftermath Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2017