Marcus Jansen is regarded as the inventor and pioneer of a new urban form of Expressionism. Jansen earned a reputation in the 1980s on the New York’s graffiti scene, where he met WEST ONE. Raised bilingually by his German father and his West Indian mother, Jansen went to a public school in Germany. In the late 1990s he developed his distinctive neo-expressionistic “Crossover” style, which references components of German Expressionism and Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combine Paintings.” Underlying themes in Jansen’s paintings include the traumata of the Gulf War, in which he served as a GI, and the desolate environment, which is not only beset by natural disasters, but also suffers from helpless humankind’s exposure to epochal upheavals such as 9/11 and the real estate bubble.
