Marc Kennes has been active as a visual artist for more than a quarter century. He was born in Wilrijk in 1962. He realised he wanted to become a painter at a young age while living near the Rupel River. He took lessons at the Drawing and Painting School in Niel and at the Royal Academy for Visual Arts in Mechelen. In the early 1980s, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the National Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp. During this period many people declared that painting, especially figurative painting, was doomed to die out. Marc Kennes graduated in an era of minimalism, video art, performance, conceptual art and many other avant-garde movements.
Ernest Van Buynder, chairman of the University of Antwerp's Art on the Campus, Edegem - March 2013