Marc Dennis

United States

0 years old

5.0 1 Reviews

Biography

Marc Dennis is an American artist known for his hyper-realistic and strikingly detailed paintings of subtly staged and slightly voyeuristic images of contemporary American culture.

Interested in the transformative possibilities of familiar artistic tropes and iconic images, Dennis explores the charged subjects of beauty, pleasure, and power. With a nod to Caravaggio, Manet, and Magritte, the artist strives to saturate his paintings with truths and clichés about human behavior and the psychological, spiritual and physical relationships we have with art. Dennis’ work is witty, smart and slightly subversive, biting at the sanctity of art and sometimes coming away with a raw piece. “I set out to create paintings that are immediate and visceral; reflecting a paradox of dualities – the believable and non-believable, the real and the staged, and the serious and the comical, which I believe touches upon a genuine, urgent vision about the art experience.”

Born in 1969 in Danvers, Massachusetts, he holds a BFA from Tyler School of Art, and M.F.A. from The University of Texas at Austin. His paintings are represented with Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in New York City, and have been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Houston. Marc was recently featured in the December 2013 issue of Modern Painters “25 Artists To Watch.” His press includes Art News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Forward, The Huffington Post, Jewish Week, The Chicago Tribune, Def Jam, and The Boston Globe, amongst others.

Marc Dennis’ paintings are in numerous private and public international collections, including those of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, John and Amy Phelan, Beth DeWoody and Firooz Zahedi, David and Jennifer Stockman, Larry and Marilyn Fields, Sean and Tammy McCarthy, Bob and Cortney Novogrtatz, Michael Danoff and Jo Laird, and The Neuberger Berman Collection, New York; The Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio, and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. In addition to being an artist, Marc is also an independent Holocaust scholar on the subject of clandestine art made by prisoners inside Nazi concentration camps, and a founder of Insects Are Food organization which supports the practice of eating insects as a sustainable, safe and nutritional food source.