Mark Francis will represent San Marino at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, taking place from 9 May - 22 November.
Curated by Luca Tommasi, the project Sea of Sound will present a new body of work by the artist, who has long been engaged in exploring the physical and poetic relationships between art, sound, and science.
In 2026, the San Marino Pavilion will be hosted in a new venue located between the Arsenale and the Giardini: Tana Art Space (Fondamenta de la Tana No. 2111), a former timber and coal warehouse that has been transformed into a space dedicated to art and culture.
Mark Francis makes powerful, optically intense paintings that are driven by the revelatory insights of contemporary science. Filled with a sense of movement and vibrational energy, his paintings combine electric colour contrasts with dynamic patterns and precise brushwork. Fields of colour are shot through with orbs or pulsating linear forms that dissolve or disintegrate, mimicking streams of light, sonic vibrations, or graphs of seismic patterns. Francis’s longstanding fascination and engagement with science provides rich territory for his painting, from the vast cosmic terrains of astronomy, to the minute and molecular concerns of mycology. Making striking imagery out of what is normally invisible, he explores the visual worlds made accessible by electron microscopes, or sonic data gathered from outer space. But while the feats of manmade technology inform Francis’s work, the thing of wonder remains the unknowable quantities beyond their reach. This is what Francis uses his imaginative power and painterly skills to conjure – sparking a tension between order and chaos, knowledge and mystery that is at the heart of his work.