Calvin Marcus
°1988, San Francisco, USA
Works and lives in Los Angeles.
Calvin Marcus works across a variety of media to construct self-contained worlds in which humour, absurdity, and unease converge. Known for developing distinct bodies of work, Marcus approaches each series as an autonomous language through which to probe the psychological and formal possibilities of image-making. For the artist, repetition is not a simple gesture of uniformity or reproduction, but of inquiry: an act of returning to a motif or surface to uncover what more it might reveal.
Marcus’s works often pivot between the comic and the uncanny. Earlier series have included surreal self-portraits – such as his Green Calvin – and depictions of everyday objects or beings rendered strange through isolation and scale. His recent paintings, whether portraying close-up renderings of apparently banal grass and clover, agonising soldiers, or fleshy, veined abstractions that oscillate between body and marble stone, continue this exploration of ambiguity and psychological depth.
Marked by a wry humour and a fascination with the thresholds between the familiar and the strange, Marcus’s practice reflects on the nature of representation itself, as well as its capacity for distortion and absurd revelation. In 2025, the artist presented his first institutional solo exhibition in Europe at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Ghent, premiering a new series of sculptures and paintings that extend this exploration of surface appearance and the uneasy meanings artworks may hold.
