Marc Dennis

Courtesy of the artist Marc Dennis and GAVLAK, Los Angeles/Palm Beach

Marc Dennis’s captivating hyperrealist paintings are virtuoso in their technical accomplishment and rich in narrative and humor. Working on the genres of still life and portraiture, Dennis blends art-historical references with pop culture, including celebrity portraits and Disney characters, as well as celebrating his love of the natural world. Throughout his practice, he playfully reconsiders ideas of beauty, creating a tension between the classical and the contemporary. Set against a black background to create eye-popping vibrancy, the dense, elaborate arrangements of flora in Dennis’s still lifes are subverted by additional elements — glorious Technicolor bugs, the odd wilting bloom or the inclusion of text. In his recent series, ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ (2021), alongside painstaking copies of works by masters both past and more recent, the artist includes an equally realistic painting of his studio wall, with its smears of paint and pinned-up reference images. In other works, the animal kingdom provides surreal disruptions: a group of penguins gathers approvingly in front of a still life (Allegory of Admiration, 2021); a dog jumps to catch a frisbee, partially obscuring Dennis’s rendition of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1848 portrait of Baronne de Rothschild (Where the Sun Hits the Water, 2021); while Gerhard Richter’s iconic 1988 painting Betty is infiltrated by a leaping cat (Richter’s Cat, 2021). Born in 1972, Dennis lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently showing at the Berkshire Botanical Garden, Stockbridge, MA, and his work is held in numerous public collections, including: Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA; and Springfield Museum of Art, OH.  

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