After Two Decades as an Art World Outlier, Marc Dennis’s Time Has Come
After Two Decades as an Art World Outlier, Marc Dennis’s Time Has Come
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On a chilly evening in mid-September, painter Marc Dennis was dining at Le Gratin, Daniel Boulud’s tony new downtown Lyonnais restaurant next to the Beekman Hotel. It was only 7 pm, but the restaurant was busy with a mix of large groups on their third martini and couples on first dates. On the walls around the diners hung three paintings Dennis loaned to Boulud specifically for Le Gratin, which opened last year: five-foot-tall realistic floral still lifes in the genre of memento mori, a reminder that death is never far away. A staple of art since the Renaissance, the genre is a favorite of Dennis’s. He’s explored the theme in still lifes of decapitated birds, dead animals procured straight from his local butcher in New Jersey, and remnants of a nefarious night out: a bedside table bearing a 9mm Smith & Wesson, bunched-up undergarments, and jewelry. But these paintings, depicting bouquets in various stages of decay, caught Boulud’s eye and have been in the restaurant since opening night. The paintings are, however, missing a detail that Dennis had originally thrown in. Laying on a thick French accent, he imitated his celebrity client. “Marc, can you please remove the beetles, would it be a trouble?” “Of course. How about snails?” “Oui!”
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An affable, divorced, 50-year-old father of two who lives in suburban New Jersey, Dennis was wearing a blue blazer and gingham dress shirt, and multiple metal rings and beaded bracelets. His short goatee gives him more than a passing resemblance to Johnny Depp. “My daughters’ friends all call me Johnny. Or Jack Sparrow.” For close to two decades, he has made hyperrealistic paintings partly on a commission basis, but the difference between him and your local dog portraitist is that his clients—who also buy his noncommissioned work—sit at the pinnacle of the contemporary art world. This puts him in a strange position in a milieu known for its snootiness: he is at once on the margins of the global art scene and at its red-hot center. When I told one art world insider I was writing about Dennis, he dismissed him with a single phrase: “He sucks up to collectors.” Dennis’s thriving career runs in direct contradiction to the art world’s distaste for those who hustle to promote themselves.
“Marc has always been a strong advocate for himself,” Glenn Fuhrman told me as he reached for the memory of how he first met Dennis. A MoMA trustee, Fuhrman has spent almost 20 years on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, and owns pieces by the likes of Brice Marden, Juan Muñoz, Maurizio Cattelan, and Katharina Fritsch. “I saw his work in a gallery, it must have been 15 years ago, back when I was single. I thought it was pretty amazing.” It was then that Fuhrman bought the first of the eight Dennis works he owns, Art History Major, which features a girl flashing the viewer while standing in the Sistine Chapel, a pleased smirk on her face.
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