Alysha Grace Marko

Boat Ride: Bright Contemporary Figurative Oil Painting

2022

New York City-based artist, Alysha Marko is a figural and abstract painter from Central New Jersey. Growing up, Alysha moved around the US which allowed her social personality to butterfly. With a father who documented everything, Alysha grew comfortable in the face of a camera. Alysha loved the adventure of being on the go and the revolving door of new people to meet. She loved singing, dancing, and several different sports which all taught her to be outgoing. “I love being around people and experiencing new things. I think that's really where it may have come from was moving around a lot, just being able to pick up and move every two years” Later, Alysha went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst and graduated from Seton Hall University with a degree in psychology. This comfortability in the spotlight flourished into a career in modeling and acting. While in LA, Alysha pursued modeling and acting where she was featured in ELLE Magazine, Playboy, several films, and theatre productions. Alysha moved on to become an abstract and figural artist based in New York City. Her work is full of color, and movement, and is often inspired by the world around her. Portraits of herself and her friends are just two of the common representations seen in her work “Looking in the mirror and painting myself is a way to figure myself out, but also, I like to paint my friends if they're there. I'm always with myself, so it's easy to pick up a mirror and just have a subject and study. Lately, I've been trying to uncover these things by ripping apart the image of you.” Heavily influenced by her psychology study, Alysha has used her experiences to uncover herself and how she displays herself in the art world. Themes of narcissism, vanity, essence of the individual, and sense of speech are where Alysha’s work is born. The use of texture, color, art historical tradition, and psychological figures combine to create paintings like Rodin in the Sun (2023), Candyland (2019), and Diamond Dice (2018). In 2019, along with partner Renelio Marin, Alysha started the UEast75 gallery that lived just a few blocks away from The Met, The Institute of Fine arts, and the Frick Museum. Now called AMRM gallery, Alysha has come to represent many different artists in a two-story gallery space. Angela China, David Richardson, and Nancy Pantirer are just three of the talented artists represented at the gallery.