Marc Gielen (° Hamont, Belgium, 1953) is mainly autodidact.
He combined his Greco-Latin studies ( age 12 to 18 ) at the secondary school St. Hubertus College of Neerpelt with drawing lessons at the Noordlimburg School of Fine Arts and local artists.
After his secondary school he enjoyed a year's course of painting at the St. Lucasschool of Hasselt. Afterwards he studied “law” for two years at the Catholic University of Leuven and subsequently worked several years in finance. But his love for form, tone en colour was always strongly present.

His earlier works are inspired by the surrealists De Chirico, Dali, Magritte, later on Miro, the Bauhaus, the Russian avangarde.
At that time, he immersed himself in literature with a philosophical tendency, including Kant and Hegel, Nietsche, Heidegger, the phenomenology of Husserl, Levinas, Baudrillard, the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, the insights of Lyotard and Deleuze and also Agamben and others.
The stratification of his work becomes more subtle, colour and composition become silent.

In a later phase, the play of the composition disappears almost completely and the theme becomes monadic, as if it is placed on the white surface like a desacralized icon, the fact transcends its everydayness in a dialogue with the emptiness itself.
This results in the series “Das Wahre ist das Ganze” after the well-known quote from the German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
"I was amazed by a deep experience of "totality "and "unity "when I saw, when I found the “broken”, finished or incomplete life in its broadest sense as an” To Be”, the faded wood, the boulder, the stripped snail shell, the face as an image of the recently deceased man. In the footsteps of the past, Time that Is, “the Now”is anchored. ”

From this perspective, in the next phase, the human figure - explicitly present in its first period - disappears from the image again. The distant view suffices, the endlessness, the cosmos, the depth, in which the human being, as an invisible spectator, becomes part of it.
This is reflected in the recent series "Skyfall", a series that asks for space, requires space, not as an armagedon or apocalypse, here not an eschatology, but simply as place. “SPACE” as place of melancholy and longing.

In 2018 he was “in residence” in Daegu, South Korea as part of an international exchange trough the ENCC and The Daegu Contemporary Artists Association.

In 2020 he was a guest in Grand M'bour, Senegal where he immersed himself in local art and was introduced to Gallery Cécile Fakhoury, Dakar.

Also in 2020 he participated at the international exhibition at the Galleria Luigi Bellini ,Firenze, Italy.