Calvin Marcus's 'Skin Paintings' Debuts in Europe at Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum

Calvin Marcus's first European institutional solo exhibition, 'Skin Paintings,' is on view at the Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum in Deurle, Belgium. The museum, founded in 1968 by Jules and Irma Dhondt-Dhaenens as a cultural center, houses a permanent collection including Mark Rothko, Lucio Fontana, Gerhard Richter, Michael Borremans, Luc Tuymans, and Jan Van Imschoot. Marcus, born in San Francisco in 1988, explores psychic and social themes through visual arts, using oil on linen. For this show, he employs Belgian linen—the same fabric used by historical masters like Rubens and Rembrandt—to build waxy, luminous surfaces veiled in white. His paintings feature subtle networks of veins, faint bruises, spectral sutures, and shifting tones of blue, pink, and green, drawn from the artist's own skin tones. The works blur the line between realism and invention, representation and abstraction. Marcus has previously exhibited at Karma New York (2024), House of Gaga Guadalajara (2024, with Laura Owens), David Kordansky Los Angeles (2019, 2016), K11 Musea Hong Kong (2019), The Power Station Dallas (2017), Peep-Hole Milan (2015), and Public Fiction Los Angeles (2014). His work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and group shows at Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2023), Start Museum Shanghai (2022), Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2022), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk (2021-2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2020).