Marcus Antonius Jansen b.1968, in Manhattan, New York, was discovered by one of the major connoisseurs of Abstract Expressionism in America. Jerome A. Donson, director of traveling exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, compared Jansen's art to that of the socio-critical Ashcan School, and hailed him as the innovator of a modern expressionism (See Modern Urban Expressionism; The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen, 2006). Jansen is best known for his faceless colonial and corporate criticism and his distorted landscape paintings.

For Marcus Antonius Jansen, rewriting history or at least re-examining it through his personal lens is central to his artistic practice. He understands that history is written by victors, and that valid dialogue in art history requires multiple perspectives. For the last 30 years, Jansen was heavily inspired in the early 1980’s by a graffiti writing from New York and has been later accredited to pioneering a raw, concentrated sense of immediacy in his socially critical and politically charged protest landscapes, Jansen first defiant works began to surface in his Military barracks he stayed in 1996 while stationed in Vilseck Germany and selling his work on Prince Street and Broadway in Manhattan, New York City in 1999 as part of the “Prince street kings” artists setting up on street corners in SOHO.