Marc Prats (1995) is a London-based artist born in Barcelona. He is currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London and previously received his BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Utrecht University (2016).
Prats has exhibited internationally, with his most recent show at the Christian Marx Gallery in Düsseldorf (2020). He has also been shortlisted for the Signature Art Prize (2019) among other awards.
A central concept in Prats’s work is that of the ‘weird’, which is defined as a disruption of the natural world by presenting the ordinary from the perspective of outside forces, leading to a sensation of strangeness or wrongness in the viewer. As such, the weird has often been linked to the realm of science fiction and through it to the relationship between technology and the human condition. Prats’s preoccupation with science and technology is rooted in the fact that while he was born with extreme nearsightedness, advanced medical techniques helped improve his eyesight and have allowed him to lead a normal life. In his work, Prats draws from these experiences and his upbringing as a third culture citizen in a globalised post-digital world, to fill his canvases with personal or historical technological references. These elements form elaborate allegorical narratives imbued with a dystopian aesthetic.
Prats often uses thick coats of pigment to depict his strange characters, awkward neon lights, glitches and out-of-place objects. His technique alternates between a flat application of paint and a broken brustroke reminiscent of impressionism or the pixels of a photograph, perhaps alluding to the image-saturated visual culture of our times. If 2020 could be described in one word, ‘dystopian’ might well be it, which is why Prats’s perverse worlds seemed eerily premonitory of what the past year brought about for humanity.