PORTRAIT BY MALLORY WEDDING

TUCKED AWAY IN A WEST ADAMS SYNAGOGUE converted into a studio, Calvin Marcus is in deadline mode, putting the final touches on his new show, “GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG.” Opening November 1 at David Kordansky Gallery in Mid–Wilshire, the solo exhibition offers a diverse selection of large–scale canvases, sculpture and photography. It’s an eclectic array of images in a variety of media, an extension of his five paintings that greeted visitors to this year’s Whitney Biennial as they stepped off the elevators onto the museum’s sixth floor. 

“Every time I’ve done a show in New York or any other city, I assume no one goes to see it, and it just sort of disappears,” Marcus says during a breather in his kitchen, away from the hubbub of what has been a breakthrough year. Behind him, late summer sunlight spills through stained glass windows casting multicolored hues across the room. He takes in the quiet, disrupted only momentarily by an approaching siren outside. “I have a great sense of disbelief that things are going well.” 

But things are going well for the 31–year–old who moved to Lincoln Heights from San Francisco just a decade ago with little more than a compulsion to paint. Living in a small former barbershop storefront, he landed a job as an assistant to artist and gallerist Laura Owens, earning money where he could, making furniture early in the mornings and managing a bar night at Speranza in Silver Lake. It wasn’t until he enrolled in a master’s program at UCLA that Marcus found the time he needed to seriously dedicate himself to his own practice, studying with the likes of Jennifer Bolande, Roger Herman and Lari Pittman. 

Living in LA, Marcus finds it easier to focus on work than in a city like New York or Paris, where there’s always something going on and getting swept up in the scene is nearly unavoidable. “LA is a really good place to separate yourself and make stuff without compromise and without contamination of what other people are doing, which I think is a special Wild West condition,” he says. “It’s very easy to be just slightly out of the way here.” 

Here, Marcus has found the time, space and freedom to experiment. Drawing is essential to his process, but most compositions are set aside to percolate. On occasion he’ll glance down at a stack and find an image cropped by one on top of it, and inspiration will strike. He’ll trace the concept on a new sheet, make alterations, perhaps trace it again and begin to look at color studies. The work begets new ideas. From simultaneous projects pushing toward completion, fresh concepts emerge, snowballing the process forward ever since his first solo show at Public Fiction in 2014.

This fall’s solo exhibition at Kordansky–his largest and most ambitious to date–will be Marcus’s first not focusing on a series. “It’s the most diverse group of works I’ve ever put together. All the paintings are completely autonomous. They’re their own things,” he says of a show that departs from serial projects, like his 2015 exhibition of tongue paintings and ceramic works at Peep–Hole in Milan or the ensuing large- scale oil–stick compositions of fallen soldiers and grassy fields in “Were Good Men” at Clearing in Brooklyn the following year. While Marcus has made himself a repeating presence in shows such as 2016’s “Malvin Carcus,” which included shirts made and worn by the artist and displayed fresh from the dry cleaners in plastic, and 2015’s “Green Calvin,” which featured green ceramic oven–ready rotisserie chickens attached to green canvases, variety remains the only constant in his body of work. 

Variety seems to be the point of “GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG” (a palindromic example of Marcus’s signature wordplay), which appropriately includes a piece called City Pig/Wild Boar (2019), a bisected frame showing a cartoon pig in an armchair reading The New York Times on the left side and a boar in green grass with a blue- sky background on the right. City Pig/Wild Boar, by design, has little to do with the frazzled edge of a brown carpet curling up against a saffron background in another painting, or the red and blue nebulae that seem to explode against a starry expanse in another, or even the non–sequitur sculpted forearm reaching upward, just a few of the canvases Marcus is finishing for the multi–gallery exhibition at Kordansky. 

Marcus, who designs his installations with as much exactitude as he applies to his art, also plans to show a self–illuminated sculpture and a photo of a giant plate of asparagus. In actuality, the plate is some five feet in diameter, and the spears are eight–foot agave spears, found frequently in Southern California. In another gallery, four Stretch Sturgeon (2019) paintings of limousine–length fish, each 22 feet in soft lemon and lime. tones, will encircle viewers. 

“I grew up in my father’s graphic design studio, so from day one I understood the importance of visual impact and how one gesture can bring somebody in and all the way through,” Marcus explains about his explicit style in the new work. “It’s about reaching that instantaneous connection with the viewer, breaking it down as simply as possible.” 

“I was surprised and excited the first time Calvin invited me to view the watercolor paintings,” recalls gallerist David Kordansky, of his own immediate reaction to the new work of the artist he’s been championing since 2015. Marcus debuted this latest body of work at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, but the paintings have been in development for several years. “It’s impressive to see these totally peculiar, one–off visions emerge from Calvin’s head and his hand,” says Mr. Kordansky. “And then there are the uncanny perceptual effects one encounters; not only are these ‘minor‘ images rendered on a major, full–body, environmental scale, but the paintings themselves still retain all of the feeling and materiality of their smaller origins.” 

While the inclusion in the Whitney (a surprise to the artist himself) and the attention of the art world in the last few years has raised his global profile, Marcus remains focused on finding those human connections. He credits this persistent and dogged pursuit of making accessible art that resonates culturally with the constant evolution of his work. For example, the use of mixed media in the new pieces is dictated by necessity. If there’s a particular shade of blue that is deeper and more resonant in oil, he’ll use that and do the rest of the painting in watercolor. 

The show, says Mr. Kordansky, is “a departure and a maturation, in Scope and ambition. It’s definitely Calvin–no one else would have these brilliant ideas and produce them in his seemingly offhand, yet exquisite manner–but there’s a little less of himself in the works and more of the world. The reach of this show is going to surprise a lot of people.” 

It is Marcus’s aim to do just that. “I hope it’s not so ‘inside art‘ that it doesn’t communicate to anybody that hasn’t gone to art school,” Marcus explains. “I always get excited when people who are outside of that can connect with the work.”