Calvin Marcus exhibits his Skin Paintings at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

The Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, located in Deurle, presents Skin Paintings, the first institutional solo exhibition of Calvin Marcus in Europe, on view from 18 May to 17 August 2025. The exhibition presents oil paintings on linen that depict magnified renderings of the artist’s flesh alongside bronze and ceramic vessels.

Inspired by oil painting techniques used by the Flemish Old Masters and the artifacts of early human civilizations, Skin Paintings extends Marcus’s investigation of media, process, and the abject in the familiar. Rather than depicting the body as a subject or carrier of identity, Marcus abstracts the skin into a sensory surface: a site of memory, perception, scarring, and transformation.

At the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens —with its quiet spaces, openness, and natural light—Marcus’s paintings come to life. They invite prolonged contemplation. Not simply to be looked at, but to be felt. To trace the surface with the eyes, and in doing so, to rediscover the body—the painter’s, the viewer’s. The delicate surface of Calvin Marcus’s Skin Paintingscaptures and refracts the natural light that filters through the museum’s singular glass architecture. The result is a subtle and ever-evolving dialogue between the work, the viewer, and the space.

As the artist notes, “The horror of examining skin this closely is the threat of its puncture.” Look at anything long enough and it will become pure surface, devoid of referent; hyperrealism bends back around to the uncanny.

The Work

At first glance, the paintings in this exhibition may appear serene, almost minimal. They are luminous, restrained, and precisely composed. But as you step closer, the surfaces begin to reveal their complexity: fine networks of veins, faint bruises, ghostlike sutures, and shifting tones of blue, pink, and green begin to emerge. These are paintings that quietly echo the human body—not through overt representation, but through the suggestion of skin, vulnerability, and transformation.

Marcus based the color palette on close observations of his own body—particularly the nearly transparent skin on the tops of his feet and the insides of his arms—capturing a spectrum of jaundiced yellows, bruised blues, and mottled pinks. The result is a surface that feels uncannily lifelike, yet abstracted beyond recognition. Devoid of pores or hair, these skin-like fields blur the line between realism and invention, representation and abstraction.

Each work is made through a slow, layered process: alternating coats of white and colored oil paint are applied over Belgian linen, then finished with delicate glazes. The result is a surface that doesn’t just reflect light, but seems to hold it within. The skin of each painting feels alive, as if it’s breathing, aging, or healing.

Marcus treats the canvas as a kind of living membrane—something that registers time, touch, and emotion. His visual language draws inspiration from both art history and the body itself: the luminous flesh tones of Rubens and Rembrandt, the fractured corporeality of Francis Bacon, the emotional immediacy of Brice Marden, and the layered realism of Jan van Eyck and Hendrick ter Brugghen. Marcus turned to high-grade Belgian linen—the very surface that supported their innovations—and transformed it through countless translucent layers of oil and glaze, slowly building waxy, luminous surfaces veiled in milky whites. This additive process parallels the formation of skin itself: a cycle of regeneration, fragility, and renewal.

A final, crucial element in these works is the frame—a detail that insists on the painting’s status as an “artifact.” The gilded frame is not neutral or merely functional; it actively speaks to the painting’s role as an art object, moving through time and history. This “artist’s frame” was conceived by distilling the visual language of a much thicker, more ornate decorative frame down to just two essential elements. The result retains a sense of embellishment, but feels more contemporary—simultaneously refined and referential. Marcus intentionally designed the frame to look as if it had been selected by someone other than the artist, perhaps for the purpose of home decor. This choice adds a conceptual twist: it invites us to imagine these paintings not only as contemporary artworks, but as domestic heirlooms—strange, luminous objects hanging above a mantle, part of a family legacy. That tension between the intimate and the surreal, the refined and the uncanny, deepens the works’ psychological complexity, casting them as both deeply personal and quietly theatrical.

The Artist

Calvin Marcus (b. 1988, San Francisco) works serially, creating stylistically distinct bodies of work that probe unsettling subjects, both psychic and social, across a variety of media. For each new suite, Marcus develops unique material processes—discussing his slippery subject matter and free approach to craft, the artist explains: “I feel no loyalty to one particular medium, I let the idea dictate the form and go from there.” Marcus lives in Los Angeles.

The artist has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Karma, New York (2024); House of Gaga, Guadalajara, Mexico (2024, with Laura Owens); Clearing (Los Angeles, 2021; Brussels, 2020; New York, 2018, 2016, 2015); 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). In 2019, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. Recent institutional group exhibitions include those at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2023); Start Museum, Shanghai (2022); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2022); Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2021–2022); and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2020), among others. Marcus’s work is in the permanent collections of the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; K11 Art Foundation; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

PRATICAL INFORMATION 

Calvin Marcus, Skin Paintings
​From 18 May 2025 to 17 August 2025 ​
​Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
​Museumlaan 14 9831 Deurne
​museumdd.be