Marc Molk is born in 1972 in Marseille.
He lives and works in Paris.

A painter and a writer, he develops a work in which these two disciplines meet and mix autobiography and fiction.

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Marc Molk Portrait

In 1997, after a two year foundation degree in literary studies, Marc Molk received an M.Phil in Esthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. His dissertation, under the direction of Anne Moëglin-Delcroix, is entitled Techniques of Realism in Contemporary Painting. He then began to compose a thesis – unfinished – on The Phenomenological Function of Pictorial Representation, under the direction of Michel Haar.

His first novel, Human Losses, was published in 2006 by Arléa.

During the subsequent years he participated in several collective exhibitions.

In 2010, he was one of the finalists of the Guasch Coranty Foundation’s International Painting Prize. His work was exhibited at the Tecla Sala Art Centre in Barcelona.

In 2010 he also took part in the exhibition Archichaos at the Rove Project gallery in London, with Théo Mercier, Lucien Murat and other French artists. Following this, the Galeria dos Prazeres gallery dedicated a solo exhibition to him in Madeira.

In 2011, he was invited by Arte, on the occasion of the DVD release of the entire Barbie trial, to express himself on the representation of the Holocaust in painting, through his painting The Vel’ d’Hiv Stadium.

In 2012, he participated in the 57th Montrouge Salon. A solo exhibition was given to him at the Da-End gallery in Paris.

2012 also saw the publication of a monograph dedicated to his painting, titled Marc Molk : Ekphrasis, published by D-Fiction & Label hypothèse. The launch of this catalog, where eighteen contemporary french writers wrote about paintings, took place at Artcurial.

In 2003, his novel The Disappearance of the Real World was published in the collection Qui Vive, published by Buchet/Chastel.

The year 2014 saw the publication of Eye-catching, a new take on painting, a collection of very personal texts on thirty paintings from across the ages, published by Wildproject. The book was launched in Paris at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature).

On October 30th and 31st, 2014, he took part in the symposium The Factory of Painting, held at the Collège de France, together with Jeff Koons, Anne Neukamp, Damien Cadio, Jules de Balincourt, Eva Nielsen, Hernan Bas, Chéri Samba, Thomas Lévy-Lasne, Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Gregory Forstner, Glenn Brown, and Amélie Bertrand. His speech was entitled “The Sentimental Reason”.

In 2015, Arte dedicated a film to his work as a painter and the magazine L’Oeil included him in their February edition in a selection entitled “Who are the painters of tomorrow ?”.

In 2016, he exhibited with Chéri Samba and Kimiko Yoshida at the Galerie Marguerite Milin.
“The Instance of the Letter” presents for the first time as a whole its calligrams. Mostly made from classical texts they take sophisticated forms of skeletons and sex.

In 2017, he exhibited in Berlin and Paris. He comments in “The Triumph of Images”, a film by Jérôme Prieur devoted to Romanesque art, the frescoes of Vic le Nohan alongside Jean Wirth (University of Geneva), Patrick Boucheron (College of France), Jérôme Baschet ( School of High Studies), Cécile Voyer (University of Poitiers).

In 2018, he made several performances, among others during the “Extravadance” festival at the Pompidou Center. Several of his calligrams are included in “The Anthology of Contemporary Erotic Poetry” published by Classiques Garnier.

In 2019, he exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Limoges with Charles Beaudry, François Mendras, Ida & Wilfried Mille, among others.

In 2020, he exhibited at the Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris as part of the Coeurs (Heart) exhibition. This exhibition devoted to romanticism in contemporary art brings together works by Martine Aballéa, Pilar Albarracín, John M. Armleder, Gilles Barbier, Ronda Bautista, Sophie Calle, Hsia-Fei Chang, Delphine Coindet, Jim Dine, Jacques Halbert, Oda Jaune , Ouka Leele, Philippe Mayaux, Annette Messager, Marc Molk, Mrzyk & Moriceau, Claude Nori, Vincent Olinet, Jorge Orta, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Françoise Pétrovitch, Pierre and Gilles, Sarah Pucci, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille, Luise Unger, Winshluss.

Also in 2020, the Marguerite Milin gallery devotes a personal exhibition to him entitled Pour le meilleur et pour le Pire (For Better and Worse). The exhibition presents numerous calligrams accompanied by large paintings, like the Musée de la Vie Romantique which also chose, by exhibiting two paintings and a calligram, to present the work of Marc Molk in its “rapsodium” dimension, namely in its variety of mediums.

François Salmeron will write about this exhibition in Le Quotidien de l’Art: “It probes in all their complexity the meanders of the heart and the tragic lover between poetry, fantasy, hermetic and allegorical visions. ”

In 2021, he curates the exhibition “They said yes” which brings together 30 painters from the French contemporary scene including Philippe Mayaux, Marlène Mocquet, Antoine Carbonne, Eva Nielsen, Mireille Blanc, Vincent Olinet, Karine Rougier, etc.

The same year, his personal exhibition entitled “Amourette” at the Marguerite Milin gallery presented a set of paintings that broke completely with his previous style. Deploying an aesthetic of emblems, exclusively made on tondos, they all deal with the question of love by working to reformulate the figure today despised and demagnetized from the heart.

This new painting is presented at ART PARIS.

In 2022, he participated in several group exhibitions including “SALO X”, curated by Laurent Quenéhen and “Fleurs de peaus” at the Galerie Meyer.

He also curates the exhibition “La Pyramide de Ponzi” which brings together 40 painters from the French contemporary scene including Françoise Pétrovitch, Amélie Bertrand, Mathieu Cherkit, Romain Bernini, Robert Devriendt, Jean-Luc Blanc, Hugo Capron, Raphaëlle Ricol, Katia Bourdarel , Laurent Proux, Elene Shatberashvili, Élodie Lesourd, etc.

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