Pow! Collage

Mark Engel is a California-based painter whose work explores the body as a shifting site of memory, emotion, and transformation. Through fragmented, layered figures, Engel reflects on the porous nature of identity in a hyper-connected world. Mark received his BFA and MFA from San Jose State University and is a professor at Mission College in Santa Clara, Ca. His recent solo exhibitions include Shapeshifters at Know Future Gallery (2025), Constellations at Vargas Gallery, and Shifting Terrain, an upcoming exhibition at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California. His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions across the United States, including at Baton Rouge Gallery Center for Contemporary Art, Limner Gallery in New York, and 33 Contemporary Gallery in Chicago. His paintings have appeared in publications such as Create! Magazine, Artsin Square, and Artianne Magazine. My practice investigates the body as a site of emotional, psychological, and physical transformation where the self is a composite of experience, perception, and historical residue. Through a process-driven approach to painting, I explore fragmentation, distortion, gesture, and layering as strategies for disrupting fixed readings of identity and form. The figures I construct are in constant flux. Bodies fracture, bloom, and dissolve to blur the boundary between interior and exterior, self and other, offering a visual metaphor for the complexities of embodiment in contemporary life.