MARC DENNIS
About the artist
Marc Dennis (b.1974, Danvers, MA) is an American artist known for his hyper-realistic paintings that celebrate the subversive potential of beauty and explore the charged subjects of identity, nature, love and loss.
Interested in transformative possibilities, Dennis merges various movements throughout the western art historical canon, with modern tropes to create fresh paintings rich with intrigue and metaphysical inquiry.
By co-opting celebrated paintings of centuries past Dennis' works find new meaning in the hallowed lineage of Old Master painting to explore contemporary questions of cultural identity, humor, and the consumption of images. Dennis' artistic inspiration is drawn from his personal experiences and many adventures, ranging from accidentally starting a forest fire at age seven, to his days camping in the El Yunque rainforest as a middle-schooler in Puerto Rico to his somewhat troubled teen years, including multiple arrests, knife fights, several gun-related incidents, a night in jail, and his day in court, to his highly influential time post-college days living in a teepee on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Wanblee, South Dakota, on the property of Richard Moves Camp, the Wicasa Wakan or Holy Man of the Oglala Lakota. His many adventures and travels include having lived in Israel, Rome, Venice, Florence, and Egypt; and spending three grueling weeks trekking uncharted animal trails in the Andes Mountains in Peru.
Born in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1974, Dennis was one of five sons and grew up in and around Boston, Puerto Rico, New York, and New Jersey. His father was born and raised in Havana, Cuba in an orthodox Jewish family, and immigrated to Dorchester, Massachusetts when he was 16 when Castro took control of the island. His mother was born and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts in a reformed liberal Jewish family.
“My overall intention is to reconceptualize the past and the present together to create something new. Somewhere in all of this are a range of lessons about ourselves and the world.."
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS: Venus Over Manhattan, Hirschl & Adler Modern, Harper’s, GAVLAK, and Ernst Hilger Galerie, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the FLAG Art Foundation.