Marc Blake (b. 1974, Auckland, New Zealand) is a painter and photographer whose work operates between material process, constructed imagery, everyday experience and psychological space. Blake’s works bring together painting, photography, drawing, printing and digital image-making through a process of accumulation and compression that has evolved over two decades. Images pass repeatedly between physical and digital forms, where they are altered, documented, sampled, erased and reconstructed. Photographs, paintings, drawings and traces of earlier works are treated equally as material, allowing multiple moments of making to coexist within a single image.

Rather than arriving at fixed images, Blake’s works examine what happens to images over time, even through the process of being viewed as complete paintings. Fragments accumulate, disappear, return and shift between physical, digital and mechanical forms, creating compositions in which multiple moments, places and processes remain simultaneously present. The resulting works are less concerned with depicting a single scene than with revealing the continual transformation of images as they move through memory, experience and the act of making itself.

Drawing on Blake’s experience of living and working across New Zealand, Japan, Australia as well as close familial ties to Korea, and on the accumulation of images gathered through travel, family life, art making and everyday observation, his paintings approach place as something remembered, translated and reassembled through time rather than as a fixed subject. This cultural and experiential movement informs the way his images hold multiple influences, locations, notions of time, and personal and collective histories. Some works retain a clear relationship to remembered moments or observed images, while others move towards a more unstable field in which images are partially absorbed, obscured or broken down by the processes that produce them.

Blake has been a recipient of and multiple finalist in several national awards, including winning the Supreme Award at the 2023 Craigs Aspiring Art Prize. Living in Japan from 2002-2006, Marc completed a studio residency and exhibition at BankART NYK Yokohama, as well as exhibiting at Arts Council Koganecho and the Kyoto Cultural Museum. His work has also been shown at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and The Dowse Art Museum. Recent solo exhibitions include “On Canvas”, Aotearoa Art Fair (2023), ‘Like Pleasures of the World”, Alexandra Museum (2023) and “Alta”, Te Atamira, (2025). Marc’s work is held in numerous collections in New Zealand and abroad, including the Craigs Investment Partners collection and 16 works held in the Arts House Trust collection.