INNERCIRCLE GALLERY EXHIBITION/GLOUCESTER 15TH AUGUST 25

MY BIG BEAUTIFUL TANK SERIES 1–5

Fragments of Maps of Naples mounted on canvas

40 x 50 cm each

Mixed Media, 2025

This exhibition at the Innercircle Gallery in Gloucester, opening on 15th August 2025, brings Marc Craig’s newest series into sharp focus. These tank paintings function as a meditation on the endless loop — the tragic fallacy — of trying to persuade the masses that something inherently brutal can somehow be beautiful.

In these works, Craig plays with the unsettling paradox at the heart of propaganda. Tanks, symbols of force and authoritarian power, are presented in riotous colour, layered graffiti lines, and scattered laughter — as though mocking their own spectacle. At first glance, they almost succeed in seducing us, bright and electric, like pop culture made violent. Yet the irony is deliberate: closer scrutiny reveals these pieces as uneasy contradictions, exposing raw edges beneath the polished surface.

This tension mirrors a deeper human cycle, where regimes — fascist or otherwise — wrap violence in visual appeal, manipulating aesthetics to sell an ideology. Craig’s tanks take on this game, initially convincing, then unraveling, until the truth emerges regardless. There is a stark, sometimes painful beauty in witnessing that collapse of illusion.

For Craig, this series is also a personal loop, pushing him to question allure, deception, and the strange magnetism of power. As part of the Innercircle Gallery’s inaugural exhibition programme, it challenges Gloucester’s art audience to grapple with what attracts them — and what ultimately unsettles them. It is an invitation to look harder, to confront paradox, and perhaps to laugh at the hollow grandeur before seeing it clearly for what it is. Details of exhibiton coming soon. 

Mappa Mundi marks the first exhibition of Marc Craig’s map paintings, a body of work born in a flurry of creative urgency during May and June 2025. This initial series emerged almost compulsively, fed by a stream of donated maps that arrived from friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Each offered map seemed to unlock a new threshold, propelling Craig deeper through the layers into an increasingly raw and intense creative space — one that left him hungering for more.

These maps became portals. As Craig worked over them, they revealed darker, more liberated energies that had long sought a voice but remained suppressed. Old city grids, country borders, and forgotten tourist trails dissolved under instinctive mark-making, becoming psychological terrains where personal mythologies took shape. Jungian threads run through these works: the shadow emerges in raw gestures and fractured landscapes, archetypal figures seem to haunt certain spaces, and there’s a sense of old symbols trying to surface through the chaos.

In many ways, this process has been deeply therapeutic. For Craig, finding a voice on these maps — especially when the world often feels determined to silence or constrain it — is an act of defiance as much as healing. It’s a way to stand inside the murk of the subconscious and still claim authorship over it.

Already, Craig is moving into a second chapter of these map paintings, continuing the journey into shadow, instinct, and the half-remembered spaces that insist on being seen. Mappa Mundi offers just the first glimpse.

LEARN TO SWIM

Map of Glasgow

34 x 40 inches

Mixed Media on Found Map, 2025

This marks Marc Craig’s first unveiling of his map paintings in London—a debut uncannily aligned with The Dark Side’s exploration of shadow and solitude. There is a certain gravity to these works arriving in the Tower Bridge district, a place whose own layered histories seem to resonate with Craig’s cartographic canvases.

In SMOKINCATBAT (2025, 77 x 58cm), a distorted figure snarls through jagged teeth and blood-bright eyes. Part jester, part revenant, this trickster spectre teeters between comedy and dread, mocking and menacing in equal measure. Nearby, BARRETT TWINS (2025, 73 x 98cm) presents mirrored skeletal forms sprawled across faded bureaucratic plans—suggesting inherited sorrow, twin anxieties, or the splintered dualities that haunt identity.

Craig’s paintings are visceral, irreverent, and profoundly uneasy. By embedding his unsettling figures into historical maps, he forges a dialogue between personal shadow and collective memory. The maps serve as literal anchors—known geographies over which psychic dramas unfold. It is as if familiar places are being re-haunted by half-buried fears and obsessions.

There are no tidy resolutions here. Craig’s work resists easy interpretation, lingering instead with the uncomfortable questions at the heart of The Dark Side: does a latent shadow dwell in every act of creation? Can one wrestle that darkness without being consumed?

In this first London presentation, Craig draws viewers into that fragile theatre where the studio’s silence becomes a crucible. It is here, amid the uneasy laughter of his painted spectres, that sanity hangs by a thread—and strange beauty is born from the depths.

SMOKINCATBAT

2025

Framed Mixed Media on Map (77 x 58 cm) 

BARRETT TWINS

2025

Mixed Media on Map (73 x 98 cm)