Marc Handelman

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Marc Handelman (born Santa Clara, California, 1975) is an American painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) earning a BFA in Painting in 1998, with an Art History concentration. He spent two of those years at RISD at the European Honors Program, studying in Rome. In 2003, he was awarded an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.

Known for large scale paintings and landscapes and abstract images.

Handelman’s work has been shown internationally and has been featured in the “USA Today” [1] exhibition at The Royal Academy [2] in London. He has participated in exhibitions at several prominent commercial galleries such as Lombard-Freid Fine Arts [3] and Elizabeth Dee Gallery [4] in New York, Marc Selwyn Fine Art [5] in Los Angeles. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. [6] in New York.

Marc Handelman analyses and repackages the power of visual images. His work questions the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, making references to the glory of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, political propaganda, Nazi architecture, photo-journalism, advertising and the USA’s most beloved home decor artist Thomas Kinkade. Choosing his sources for their contemporary and historical associations with politics, religion and social ideals, Handelman pastiches the alluring visual strategies of dogma and propaganda. Expropriating these dynamic genres from their associated ideologies, Handelman’s canvases reverberate with hollow splendour, creating a critical meta-aesthetic reflective of a new global outlook.

Adopting the languages and motifs of iconic images, Handelman’s paintings crop, manipulate and invert their sources to formulate abstracted and fragmented fields that resound with the uncanny. Through this re-ordering, Handelman forges parallels between media, kitsch and spirituality. Inspired by the artists of American Luminism such as Frederic Edwin Church and Fitz Hugh Lane, Handelman’s canvases incorporate light as a dramatic tool, simultaneously conjuring associations of grandeur, heraldry and divinity, while underscoring their representation as artificial constructions. Effusing this disorientating glow, Handelman’s paintings fluctuate between allegory and abstraction.