Soldier of the Avant-Garde, 2021

Marcus Jansen   Famous Artists

Marcus Jansen is an internationally acclaimed painter with studios based in Bronx, New York, and Fort Myers, Florida. Over the last 25 years, Jansen has pioneered the introduction of a raw, concentrated sense of immediate reality in his often socially critical and politically charged landscape works.

Over his art career to date, Jansen has been collected by the likes of Nicole Scherzinger, NBA all-star Carmelo Anthony and actor John Ortiz, appearing on the top 200 list of collectors Amy and John Phelan and Peggy Cooper Cafritz. He has received commissions from corporations such as Absolut Vodka, Warner Brothers, Illuminum, FIFA World Cup, and Ford Motor Company.

Jansen's unique oeuvre serves as an emotive and insightful critique of the contemporary American and global political and sociological landscape. Following a series of solo museum exhibitions in Europe in painting, multimedia, and sculpture, he sounds a stirring battle cry against the miscarriage of justice of the early 21st century through an expressive and engaged aesthetic, arguably unseen in American art since Robert Rauschenberg or Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Jansen was born in 1968, the child of a West Indian mother and raised by a German father. He first lived in the South Bronx and split his formative years between New York City and Monchengladbach, Germany. First influenced by the rebellious gestures of the 1980s graffiti movement in America, he admired those that valiantly rejected oppression through the action of marking space in paint, and would make his own start by peddling his paintings on the sidewalks of Manhattan’s SoHo district.

As a former U.S. Army soldier turned combatant for the avant-garde, it was the Desert Storm offensive that permanently altered the artist’s mode of perception and manner of expression. Expressing a strong sense of duty rather than aggression, Jansen states, “Painting is the most intimate act of war,“ about his compelling contemporary production. Former museum director, art historian, and mentor Jerome A. Donson dubbed Jansen the innovator of “modern urban expressionism”, reminiscent of the early 20th century Ashcan School of art. Former Documenta curator Dr. Manfred Schneckenburger goes further, noting Jansen is “one of the most important American painters of his generation.”

Jansen’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at the La Triennale di Milano Museum (Milan, Italy), the Spandau Citadel (Berlin, Germany), the 12th annual International Biennial Print and Drawing competition at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Kallmann Museum (Ismaning, Germany). International Art Fair showings include Art021, in Shanghai, Taipei Dangdai, in Taiwan, and Art Basel, in Miami Beach.

Jansen's public collections include the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Housatonic Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.