Last Saturday, the gallery hosted an impromptu one-day preview of Marcus Brutus: En Focus, which formally opens November 13 at Harper’s Chelsea 512. The day before, we had arranged the paintings along the floor for a special client, one of Marcus’s most dedicated supporters. The works, still in their shadowboxes, were placed by size beneath our current exhibition by Iria Leino. No curatorial thought was given to the placement; I had planned to return them to storage immediately after the meeting.
Just as the client arrived, a well-known figure in the art world stopped by to see the Leino show. Fortunately, I didn’t recognize him, because had I known who he was I might have rushed to apologize for the distraction on the floor. To my surprise, he assumed Marcus’s paintings were part of Leino’s presentation. He was struck by what he thought was the curation, even believing the shadowboxes, meant only for transport, were part of an intentional installation. Other visitors who wandered in said much the same, and I realized I had stumbled upon a happy accident.
Marcus Brutus is a cinematographic painter and a sorcerer of emotion. Many of his works have backstories or clear historical antecedents but seeing them side by side on the floor revealed a narrative framework I would have missed in a more traditional hang. Storytelling has always been at the core of his practice. His first exhibition, The Uhmericans, presented at Harper’s Apartment in 2018, was a response to Robert Frank’s The Americans, arguably the most influential narrative photobook of the twentieth century. At the time, I worried about the audacity of invoking Frank; in retrospect that debut—and the accompanying monograph—proved an inspired introduction for an unknown, self-taught artist who now has work in major collections and institutions and has collaborated with renowned brands and publications.
I ask myself constantly what makes a painting great, and why we fall in love. There’s no correct answer, but for me it always comes down to feel, emotion, and energy. The visitors who stopped by on Saturday received a full measure of all three. Seeing Marcus’s new work in sequence, all at an intentionally intimate scale, felt like encountering him anew. His faces are studies in the human condition. He has an irrepressible gift for depicting both joy and pathos—whether painting dancers, athletes, violinists, or, in the case of Nova Scotian Baptism, two figures engaged in a spiritual exchange. The painting is based on a clip from Black Mother, Black Daughter (1989), a documentary about Nova Scotia’s Black community. Above all, Marcus has an uncommon ability to recontextualize the margins of cultural history, giving fresh life and prescience to stories that are little-known or long forgotten. You might call it poetic appropriation.
En Focus is Marcus Brutus’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery. His show Maiden Voyage inaugurated our flagship space in Chelsea. I’ve told this story often, but I’ll never forget the first time I saw Marcus’s work—on Jen Guidi’s Instagram. It leapt off the screen, and hours later we had plans for a show. His paintings spoke to me in a way I usually feel from reading literature, listening to music, or watching sports. Or maybe it all comes back to Robert Frank. In the end, what makes anything great is love.
—Harper Levine
Marcus Brutus (b. 1991, Silver Spring, MD) is a self-taught, Washington, DC–based artist who holds a Bachelor of Science degree from St. John’s University, Queens. Most recently, his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions: Lotus Blossom, Harper’s, Los Angeles (2024); Poetics of Exile, Stems Gallery, Paris (2023); At the Rendez-vous of Victory, Carl Koystál, Stockholm (2022); Maiden Voyage, Harper’s, New York (2022); Good Night Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning, Library Street Collective, Detroit (2020); Marcus Brutus: The Truth That Never Hurts, Harper's, East Hampton (2020); and Go To Work. Get Your Money and Come Home. You Don’t Live There, Harper’s, East Hampton (2019). Brutus was included in the 2019 group presentation American African American, curated by Arnold Lehman, at Phillips, New York, as well as group shows at Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2025); The Shepherd, Detroit (2025); Harper’s, Los Angeles and East Hampton (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020); Zeitz MOCAA, Capetown (2023); Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles (2023); Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2022 and 2021); König Galerie, Berlin (2021); and Carl Kostyál, Stockholm (2021). His work has been acquired by the Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. Brutus’s painting Bus Stop appears on the cover of the anthology The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives, published in September 2021 by Oxford University Press. His first monograph, Marcus Brutus: The Uhmericans, which features an essay by Gagosian director and curator Antwaun Sargent, was published by Harper’s in 2019.