A Hug From The Art World is proud to present Marc Dennis’
“Three Jews Walk into a Bar”
The exhibition opens on Thursday, September 7th through Saturday, October 7th, with an opening celebration from 6 - 8 PM. Jewish-American artist Marc Dennis is known for his hyper-realistic style, which celebrates the subversive potential of beauty, art history, and faith. Being Jewish is an ineluctable part of Dennis’ process and enterprise. “Three Jews Walk into a Bar” is a series of paintings only he could paint. The exhibition is a deep dive into his own Ashkenazi ancestry providing us with fresh observations on identity, humor, and what being Jewish may essentially mean in today’s world.
By co-opting Édouard Manet’s celebrated painting, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” Dennis finds new meaning in the hallowed lineage of the bar joke as well as Old Master painting to explore urgent questions of Jewish identity, culture, and the relationship of a contemporary audience towards historical painting. The binaries, dichotomies, complexities, and contradictions imagined in his work fuel his interpretations of what being Jewish means and how it can be made manifest. For Dennis, this series is a triumph of the human ego throughout the ages – reminding us of our own humor and humility, and our happiness and humanity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in 1972 and raised in and around Boston, Marc (his Hebrew name is Mordechai) grew up in a reformed Jewish household with four brothers and a father, who was often referred to as a “Jewban,” having been born and raised as an orthodox Jew in Havana, Cuba, and a mother whose maiden name is Solomon, who was born and raised as a secular Jew in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Marc is a Kohen from his father’s side of the family – a direct male descendant of the Biblical Aaron, brother of Moses from the priestly family of the Tribe of Levi. The paintings in his exhibition are aimed at expressing the most effective imagery from both the secular and Haredi worlds, in one sense memorializing humor after the Holocaust, serving as a tribute to Jewish comedians throughout history as well as, according to Marc, a resounding fuck you to Hitler.
Marc’s research and scholarly activity on the Holocaust is personal due to genealogical research that lists 24 members of the Klein family, his grandmother’s cousins from his mother’s side were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 as part of the Hungarian deportations; and several other cousins froze to death in the forests of eastern Poland while serving as Partisan Fighters. Marc’s art is layered with emotions, information, humor, and his exuberant personality. How he got to where he is as an artist is a long story – one that involves love, loss, a juvenile criminal background, and many challenges – all that are often explored in his paintings. One of those challenges throughout his life has been to question and at the same time strengthen his Judaism.
His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world including New York, London, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Seoul, Hong Kong, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, London, Vienna, and Houston, among others.
His works are in the permanent collections of The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; The JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; UBS Corporate Collection, Geneva, Switzerland; The Neuberger Berman Collection, New York, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; The Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Ohio; The MIN Art Museum, Guadalajara, Mexico; and The Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.
His work is primarily represented by Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach; K Contemporary, Denver; and Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas. Marc received his BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.