MARC LEPSON has been part of the downtown art scene in New York City since the early 1990’s, beginning with his work as artist and Master Printer at the Lower East Side Printshop. Lepson’s work first came to national attention as part of the activist group, ad hoc artists, staging public performances (Our Grief is not a Cry for War) in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in Lower Manhattan. In the decade that followed, his strident political prints and evocative installations were shown at Miyako Yoshinaga gallery NY, The Brooklyn Museum and the Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna. His current practice uses painting to isolate and abstract gestures of violence and domination.
Lepson has received a Pollock-Krasner Grant and his work has appeared in Art on Paper, and Art in America. He teaches drawing, imaging, and book arts at Parsons School of Design, is co-curator of the online exhibition series Fermata 3x3, and is a founding member of the Anarchist Review of Books collective.
Artist Statement
My work uses the language of painted portraiture, street photography, and scientific documentation to illuminate the violent underpinnings of contemporary western society. Through isolation and abstraction, painted subjects are treated as icons and become allegorical. This distance creates a space for contemplation; a push toward empathy, dialogue, thought, and action.
My work puts the body, both human and animal, in the position of subject; pointing to common existential experiences of bare life. These paintings examine small moments; stripping them down, shaking them loose from their context and the visual language that has historically defined them.
By revealing the gestures of domination, I go to the heart of what the philosopher Georgio Agamben describes as Homo Sacer—examining the bodies of those condemned; deemed outside the law, outside protection, deprived of rights and functions. This examination of violence committed with impunity and institutional sanction is among the most essential work of our era. It extends beyond the state’s terror tactics of police brutality against marginalized people, and into the destruction of our entire living environment.
