Marcus Antonius Jansen was discovered by one of the major connoisseurs of Abstract Expressionism in America. Art Historian, Jerome A. Donson, director of traveling exhibitions at New York's Museum of Modern Art, compared Jansen's art to that of the socio-critical Ashcan School, and hailed him as the innovator of a modern expressionism (See Modern Urban Expressionism; The Art of Marcus Antonius Jansen, 2006). 

Jansen is best known for his faceless colonial and corporate colonial criticism and his distorted landscape paintings. A former soldier, Jansen was born in New York City and later moved to Germany where he was educated. Inspired by the graffiti writers movement in the 1980’s, he later returned to his native New York. In 1999 he started selling his paintings on Prince Street and Broadway on street corners in lower Manhattan. 

In 2018, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art became Jansen's first U.S. museum solo spotlight , titled Deconstructing Marcus Jansen that was a show that investigated the stylistic techniques of painter Marcus Jansen and placed him in dialogue with Robert Rauschenberg, William de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, David Smith, John Steuart Curry, Jim Dine, and Romare Bearden. Deconstructing Marcus Jansen was the fourth in a series of exhibitions—following Francis Bacon (2013), Robert Mangold (2016), and Louise Nevelson (2018)—that focus on the style, themes, and history of individual artists within the Kemper Museum Permanent Collection. 

Jansen has held solo museum exhibitions internationally, including at La Triennale di Milano Museum, Milan, the Museum Zitadelle Berlin and a major survey at The Baker Museum, Naples, FL, (Marcus Jansen Two Decades of Relevance) and at the Rollins Museum of Art, (Marcus Jansen E Pluribus Unum). He has participated in his first U.S. Museum invitational group show titled, Under/current/overview 8, at the Tampa Museum of Art in 2006, followed by the 12th International Print and Drawing Biennial in Taiwan at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art.