Marko Stout is a complex artist who expresses dark, abstract themes through an atypical arrangement of brightly colored images.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that Stout is a doctor of medicine and metaphysics and has a degree in Biology. His pieces incorporate large doses of anatomy into a nightmarish world that is full of symbols and layers of meaning.
Stout retired from medicine in 2006 and has been pursuing artistic endeavors full-time ever since. He lived for a time on a houseboat in San Francisco and now calls New York City home. But a seemingly idyllic lifestyle belies a teeming imagination and darkly creative view.
“Post Expressionist” in the “academic visionary movement” is how Stout describes himself on his website markostout.com. Stout, it says, “provides the viewer with a spiritual experience through the brilliant twisting of human anatomy with psychological and mythical archetypes.”
His current project “The Cave” is expected to open in Manhattan in the fall of 2011.
In “The Cave,” Stout uses a series of paintings to draw the viewer into a horrific world that mixes reality and illusion for a group of prisoners chained and held immobile in a cave since birth.
"’The Cave’ as a metaphor for our thought and sensory limitations, as our human experience is limited by our imprisonment within a physical body, we therefore attempt to understand the nature of the universe through myth, religions and scientific methodology in an impossible attempt to understand the universe,” a preview of the exhibit posted on Stout’s website states.