Marc Dennis isn’t interested in simply painting still life—he’s here to shake it up. His latest exhibition, I’m Happy You’re Here, now on display at Harper’s Gallery in New York, takes the classical still life and injects it with a modern pulse. His works play with ideas of impermanence, disruption, and the tension between preservation and decay, all of these including some of his favorite flowers along with insects like bees and butterflies to beautify them even more.
A Still Life That Refuses to Sit Still Through Art by Marc Dennis
Dennis’s paintings refuse to be quiet. Take 'Happily Ever After' (2024), for example. At first glance, it’s a colorful arrangement of flowers filled with already a vast amount of life by themselves—until you notice the movement. Bees hover, hornets lurk and iridescent bubbles drift across the scene, ready to pop at any moment. Through his paintings, he wishes more than anything to express a message that nothing stays frozen in time.
In addition to commenting on the precarious interplay between the natural and man-made, the insects and glossy orbs provide the already transient images an additional degree of impermanence. Similar tensions can be seen in his works 'Allegory of the Readymade', where thick layers of plastic wrap suffocate and distort an apparently bright artwork. A reminder of life's unavoidable end, each piece of art clings to a rapidly ending moment in time while simultaneously capturing life at its best with one of the happiest elements that make people happy worldwide just by seeing them—flowers.
Marc is Happy You're Here
Marc Dennis doesn’t paint flowers just for their beauty—he uses them as symbols of contrast. In his work, flowers exist in a state of opposition: soft yet strong, short-lived yet enduring. They reference classical still-life traditions while being interrupted by unexpected details like insects, reflections, and glossy plastic. By incorporating flowers, Dennis challenges the idea of stillness itself. They are full of movement, unpredictable, and sometimes even unsettling in their precision. His florals don’t simply sit in a vase; they command attention, playing with light, texture, and meaning in ways that make the viewer question what’s natural and what’s staged.
For the past ten years, the artist has been examining the memento mori and vanitas works of the Dutch Golden Age. These still lifes of earthly delicacies were a hallmark of the seventeenth-century Baroque period in the Netherlands. With noticeable contrast and cadaverous juxtapositions, these paintings emphasize human mortality among living matter and decaying material.
Dennis contemporizes this aesthetic tradition, projecting modern inventions and media onto imagery of flora, insects, and wildlife. Across the works that comprise I’m Happy You’re Here, Dennis spectacularizes quotidian portraits of these subjects, uncovering the surreal splendor that burrows amidst the mundane.
Photos by @darcmennis
