Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present Marc Dennis: Nature Morte. The artist’s second solo exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern will feature more than sixteen new works in oil, ranging in size from 9×11 inches to 40×60 inches. Fresh and unconventional, the still life paintings in Nature Morte explore the subversive potential of beauty and pleasure found in the “raw stuff” of life – and death.

Dennis is known for his hyper naturalistic, highly detailed and obsessively delineated paintings that evoke nostalgia for familiar historical styles and aesthetic notions of beauty. However, it is Dennis’ provocative content that makes his work so compelling. In order to distill something otherworldly from within nature’s beneficence, Dennis uses imagery that is disorienting, disquieting, and even freakish. There is always something stirring beneath the surface.

Dennis uses his paintbrush as a microscope, revealing– with a perverse preference for odd and surprising details– hidden and subtly altered terrains within the natural world. Although at first glance they appear to be faithful recreations of observed details, Dennis’ canvases present us with a hyper-real unreality. The artist’s deft use of Baroque, or Caravaggesque, lighting only increases the dramatic tension in his surreal contexts.