Stolen Space Gallery present New York native artist Marcus Antonius Jansen’s 1st London solo exhibition, showcasing a new body of oil paintings on canvas.

Jansen is not afraid to be ideological, an epithet that’s unfairly earned a bad name in these contentious political times. We recognize the turmoil, the chaos, the simultaneous destruction and construction that comprise contemporary urban life.

In his work we recognize our physical and emotional world in the sparkle of oil slicks on the pavement, amid the flowers and detritus, and in the objects abandoned in the streets. His paintings record our culture’s spiritual wounds and voids, and our apathy. His work compels us to see where, and how, we live now. He reconciles opposites, identifying the elegance in the tawdry and decrepit, glorify the pure object severed from conventional beauty, balance ugliness with lightness and delicacy, and juxtapose grimness with playfulness. Open vistas erase time as they sweep us from present to past and back again. His art asks us, are we in the midst of disassembling or rebuilding, and it warns us of the danger of mistaking one process for the other. Decay, wreckage, and neglect coexist with orderly functional urban scenes. They will not let us forget that a city is merely a habitat that the human animal creates for itself. From Abstract Expressionism and Expressionism, from Rauschenberg and Basquiat, Jansen absorbs a hyper-awareness of words, text, and individual letters as pure visual objects. His work sings with Expressionism’s distortion, dynamism, and emotion. Add to that the Abstract Expressionist’s rebellious spirit and impatience with confining conventions, as well as the physicality of Jansen’s brush.

Opening reception is October 23, 2008, from 5:00 - 9:00pm and the Artist will be in attendance

Stolen Space Gallery | Dray Walk | 91 Brick Lane | London