Calvin Marcus

Calvin Marcus was born in 1988 in San Francisco, California; no source in the dossier confirms an exact birth date beyond the year. He earned a BFA from the University of Oregon in 2010 and an MFA from UCLA in 2015. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Marcus works across painting, sculpture, and drawing, letting subject dictate medium rather than committing to one material. His early exhibitions include a 2015 solo show at Peep-Hole in Milan, followed by solo shows at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles (2016 and 2019 to 2020, the latter titled Go Hang a Salami I'm a Lasagna Hog). In 2019 he was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, a milestone consistently cited across his biographies. He has shown solo with C L E A R I N G in New York, Brussels, and Beverly Hills between 2015 and 2021, and more recently with Karma in New York (2024) and Los Angeles (2025).

No verbatim, attributable critic quote from a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here. What is consistently documented is the institutional trajectory itself: inclusion in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, gallery representation across Los Angeles, New York, and Brussels, and placement in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. Taken together, these mark Marcus as an artist whose surreal, often mordantly funny imagery has been read by institutions as substantial rather than merely provocative.

Marcus's secondary market remains small relative to his institutional profile. The highest price documented for his work at auction is USD 151,200, paid for the painting Dead Soldier at Phillips; the exact sale date is not confirmed in available sources. Public auction appearances for Marcus are infrequent; other confirmed Phillips results include Automatic Drawing #1 (USD 68,750) and Malibu Venus (USD 49,020).

Marcus's auction history is thin, with only a handful of public sales and a recorded high of USD 151,200 whose exact sale date is unconfirmed, so any single result should be read with caution rather than as a stable price trend. There is no catalogue raisonne, and works are best verified through his representing galleries, Karma and C L E A R I N G. His market is best understood right now as an institutional and primary-market story, with museum collecting and biennial inclusion running well ahead of any established secondary-market track record.