Marcus Jansen: Decade

“Marcus Jansen produces violently exquisite landscapes, haunting combines, and disturbing portraiture, whose originality and powerful social critique rival the aesthetic mastery and intellectual engagement of the greatest artists of the 20th century”, writes Art FUSE, New York. Marcus Jansen (b. 1968) is a cartographer of conflict. He has been called a pioneer in redefining urban landscape painting for the last two decades. A former soldier and world traveler since the age of one year old, Jansen is the son of a German businessman and Westindien mother who was first influenced by an emerging and rebellious Graffiti art movement from his home town New York City in 1982. Jansen transforms landscapes into critical social commentary in an era of globalization and a growing new world order while exploring the human condition often working paradoxes and drawing parallels between historic and contemporary events and references. Discovered and mentored by former Museum Director and historian Jerome A. Donson (Director of the American Vanguard Exhibitions Europe 1961), who was in charge of traveling exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, (MOMA), New York and responsible for preparing exhibitions for artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Donson referred to Jansen’s work as being “reminiscent of the Ash-Can School” and referred to him as “the innovator of Modern Expressionism”, in Jansen’s French published catalogue in 2005 a decade ago.