?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
PAUL MARCUS (1953 - )
Scarlet Letter. Acrylic on cotton canvas, 762x509 mm; 30x20 1/8 inches. Signed in acrylic, lower right. Circa 2001.
Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner, private collection, New York.
In Scarlet Letter, Paul Marcus examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's famed novel The Scarlet Letter and applies a queer recontextualization of the text. The unalienable right to love between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is alternative to a queer couple's right to marry and love of one another. The figure's puritan drag and the bundle of holly lend a hand to the revisionist grasp of Harthorne's text. Marcus dons Prynne's scarlett letter but uses the greek letter for lambda now known as the symbol for the 1970s gay liberation movement. The pink triangle behind the lambda initially intended as a badge of shame by Nazi Germany, later reclaimed as a positive symbol of self-identity during the 1970s as a popular symbol of LGBTQ pride.
Painter and printmaker Paul Marcus focuses his social justice-based practice on the subjects of HIV, war, discrimination, and poverty. He studied at the Cooper Union and attained a BFA from Cooper Union in 1976 and an MFA from the University of Buffalo in 1978. In 1990, he collaborated with David Wojnarowicz (1954 - 1992) on an exhibition examining the current state of the AIDS crisis at their gallery P.P.O.W. Solo exhibitions have included Horsplay, University of Buffalo Art Galleries, University of Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, 2011; Paul Marcus: The Bush Years, ACA Galleries, New York, 2008; A Critical Reality: Works by Sue Coe and Paul Marcus, ACA Galleries, New York, 1997. He has artworks in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art. He is currently a part-time Associate Teaching Professor at The New School Parsons.
