Harper’s is pleased to announce Sugar on My Tongue, New York-based artist Marc Dennis’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Presented at Harper’s Chelsea 512, the exhibition features a new body of hyperrealist oil paintings that extend Dennis’s ongoing engagement with the illusionistic traditions of Western art history, refracting them through his signature humorous interventions. Sugar on My Tongue opens Thursday, September 10, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
In Sugar on My Tongue, Dennis recasts still life as theatrical tableaux, setting the gravitas of Old Master painting against the comic excess of contemporary kitsch. Drawing from Dutch Golden Age traditions of memento mori and vanitas—whose charged symbolism served as a reminder of mortality and life’s transience—the artist disrupts the solemnity of these forms by introducing imagery from consumer culture and the entertainment industry. These unlikely encounters unfold across the exhibition through a range of scenarios: bouquets bloom from darkened grounds while iridescent bubbles drift across the picture plane like miniature worlds; gleaming piles of silver dinnerware loom over succulent fruit while jelly oozes from a seemingly prepackaged pastry coated in powdered sugar; penguins gather before an ornate gold frame as if a museum were housed in a zoo; an enthusiastic cheerleader waving gold pompoms leaps in front of an enlarged vase of flowers, distorting all sense of scale. In one of the exhibition’s most direct pairings, a rendering of Koons’s stainless-steel Rabbit resides beside a floral arrangement painted in classical, muted tones. Taken together, these scenes establish pastiche as a generative pictorial method, folding the symbolic density of seventeenth-century still life into the glossy appeal of commercial display, so that high art and mass culture become intertwined languages of desire rather than opposing categories.
Much like sucrose, whose sweetness offers an immediate sensory reward, Dennis’s paintings stage their own retinal seduction through polished surfaces and glistening reflections, transforming looking itself into a form of visual appetite. Beyond his cross-pollination of historical themes and contemporary motifs, the force of Dennis’s practice arises from the rigor of his technique: each rendered detail is executed with a precision that recalls the technical exactitude of Old Master painting. Rather than treating virtuosity as an end in itself, Dennis uses it as a conceptual device, granting campy imagery the pictorial authority conventionally reserved for works sanctified by the myth of “creative genius.” In this, Sugar on My Tongue positions painting as a medium capable of absorbing the pleasures of popular culture into the moral theater of Western art history, where even the most irreverent images can assume the gravity of enduring subject matter.
Marc Dennis (b. 1974, Danvers, MA) received a BFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and an MFA from University of Texas, Austin. Most recently, his work has been the subject of presentations at Harper’s, New York (2026 and 2025); Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2026); Casterline Goodman Gallery, Aspen (2024 and 2016); K Contemporary, Denver (2023); A Hug From the Art World, New York (2023); Gavlak, Los Angeles and Palm Beach (2022 and 2021); and Berkshire Botanical Garden, West Stockbridge, MA (2021). Dennis has participated in recent group exhibitions at Harper’s, New York, East Hampton and Los Angeles (2026, 2024 and 2023); William Shearburn Gallery, St. Louis (2025); Lehman College, Bronx (2024); Col Gallery, San Francisco (2024); Hunter Dunbar Projects, New York (2024); and Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2023). Dennis’s work has been acquired by numerous public collections, including The Jewish Museum, New York; The North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; The Holocaust Museum, Los Angeles; JPMorganChase, New York; The Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; The Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, IL; and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Reviews of his work have appeared in New York Magazine, ARTnews, Modern Painters, Whitehot Magazine, Vulture, and Time Magazine, among other publications. Dennis lives and works in New York City.