Marcia Marcus: Mirror Image
Olney Gleason presents the solo exhibition Marcia Marcus: Mirror Image from January 8–February 14, 2026. This focused survey of paintings spans thirty years from 1964–1994 and marks the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work since 2017.
The exhibition includes three of Marcia Marcus’ critically acclaimed group portraits in dialogue with important works in other genres – self-portraiture, still-life, landscape, and architecture – demonstrating the artist’s formal inventiveness and arguing for her traceable influence on painters working today. The exhibition anticipates the artist’s career-spanning retrospective at Provincetown Art Association and Museum from June 26–August 30, 2026, which will be accompanied by a major monograph.
A singular figure in postwar American art, Marcia Marcus (1928–2025) is recognized for her rigorous and sensitive portraits of a generation of New York artists, writers, and other cultural figures from the 1960s through the 1980s, as well as her incisive self-portraiture. Marcus described her selections of subjects as instinctual, rooted in their “presence.” Typically working from life, she developed a distinctive atmospheric quality that combines intimacy with intensity, employing frontal poses, a direct gaze, and meticulous attention to costume, setting, and gesture. Her work may be understood as a humanist project that continues the Renaissance portrait tradition, advocating for the inner life of the sitter. “Art is absolutely human,” Marcus once remarked. “There is nothing mystic about it.” (1)
The exhibition emphasizes Marcus’ sustained engagement with Classical imagery and mythic time. Several key works were made after the summer of 1962, when the artist traveled extensively in Greece, living for a month in the city of Delphi prior to her Fulbright Grant in France. The Tholos of Delphi – a stone temple ruin – appears in Mirror Image (Self-Portrait) (1973). Other paintings reference ancient architectural sites, including the Tomb of Unas (1976) named after the burial chamber in which the earliest hieroglyphic funerary texts were inscribed, and Double Self-Portrait, Saqqara (1976) titled after the famed Egyptian necropolis.
Writing on Marcus’ self-portraits, art historian Charlotte Douglas connects them to the artist’s broader body of work: “Even when the works do not include self-representation—the elegant renderings of archeological artifacts, for example—there are the same two levels of time and space: life with death, substance with spirit, present with past. For the objects are not given as “real”; they have been cleaned up and refined, televised and telescoped down through the mirrored passages of time until they reach us gone, but there. Marcus makes visible the condition of being human in endless time and the elemental process of mythic creation. She does so with fine craftsmanship and poetic force. Surely she is one of our major painters.”
Marcia Marcus (1928–2025) was born and raised in New York. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States. During her life, Marcus was the recipient of major institutional awards including: the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1993); National Endowment for the Arts, Painting (1991-92); Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant (1983); RISD Museum Grant (1966); Ford Foundation Artist in Residence Grant (1966); Rosenthal Award (1964); and Fulbright Grant to France (1962-63), among others. Her paintings are held in numerous public collections, including: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Art Museum, PA; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY; Newark Museum of Art, NJ; Rose Art Museum, Waltman, MA; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Canton Museum of Art, OH; Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many others.
In 2025, Provincetown Art Association and Museum will present the artist’s career-spanning retrospective from June 26–August 30, 2026, accompanied by a major monograph.
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(1) Walter Gutman, “Marcia Marcus as Told to Walter Gutman,” ca. 1966, James Graham & Sons Records, 1821, Series 3, Artists’ Files, ca. 1907–2006, Box 47, Folder 27, “Marcus, Marcia, 1965–1967,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
