Foregrounding culture, history and humanity in portraits of everyday America.
Brutus is a figurative painter who depicts scenes from daily life, both real and imagined. All the figures in his work are African American, depicting a vast breadth of emotions and histories embedded in black experience. Brutus exaggerates reality by using vivid colour palettes and saturated tones, as well as bold contouring on the characters’ faces reminiscent of contemporary portrait artists’ such as Henry Taylor and Alice Neel. People appear in familiar environments such as at home, on holiday, and in the park, or suspended in dense abstract washes of colour that remove any notion of time...
Bio
Marcus Brutus was born in 1991 in New York, US, and now lives and works near Washington DC.
Did you know?
His paintings were presented publicly for the first time in 2018, and now command prices between $10,000 and $14,000.
Career
The exponential trajectory of Brutus' career can be attributed in part to artist Jen Guidi sharing his work on Instagram - catching the attention of influential New York gallery Harper's, who now represents him.