Marc Horowitz (American, b. 1976) is a Los Angeles-based artist working across painting, sculpture, video, performance and social practice.,,,,He built an early career on internet-based performances that blurred art and entertainment, and is credited among the first visual artists to sign with an entertainment agency. Since the mid-2010s his practice has centered on paintings that layer contemporary imagery and small trickster figures over reproductions of old master compositions.
Horowitz studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under the social-practice artists Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin, whose community-based projects steered him from studio painting toward public performance.In 2004 he wrote his phone number on a dry-erase board during a Crate and Barrel catalog shoot. Tens of thousands of calls followed, and he spent the next year driving across the United States eating dinner with strangers who phoned, as The National Dinner Tour.,The project brought him representation by the William Morris Agency.In 2010 Creative Time commissioned The Advice of Strangers, a month-long project in which Horowitz let an online audience vote on decisions in his daily life, from what he wore to whether he should visit his father's grave to make amends.,He has described the experience as traumatic and identifies it as the start of his retreat from internet-based work.
Horowitz earned an MFA at the University of Southern California in 2012, studying with Charlie White, Sharon Lockhart, Evan Holloway and Frances Stark.In 2015 he released hCoin, a pre-crypto digital currency experiment hosted on his own website, and returned that same year to painting, a medium he had set aside for fourteen years.,,His paintings build on reproductions of old master works, adding sculptural intrusions and small trollish faces recalling his earlier prankster persona.He showed the paintings in his first large-scale exhibition at the Depart Foundation in Los Angeles.In 2016 he held the solo exhibition “THE HALL. STUDIO” at Mannerheim Gallery in Paris.
In 2020 he exhibited paintings made with fellow artist Petra Cortright, his spouse, in “Zucchette Vettii” at L21 Gallery in Palma de Mallorca.,In 2023 Nouns DAO commissioned his short film Don't Tell Peanut, minted on Zora and screened at the Aesthetica Film Festival.He has also produced 1833MARCIVE.COM, a phone-in archive of recordings about his work spanning nearly three decades.,His paintings are represented by de boer gallery in Los Angeles.,His work is held in the collections of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Getty Collection, the Berggruen Collection and the Hayward Gallery.
