Jean-Marc Calvet was born in 1965 in Nice and took up painting in 2003, entirely self-taught, following a personal crisis he went through in Costa Rica.

His early work, made with house paint on any surface he could find, is recognisable by its wide-eyed figures, somewhere between Mayan masks and art brut, where bright colours give way to a profusion of detail. Now based in Granada, Nicaragua, he won the jury prize at the 7th Nicaragua Art Biennial in 2009, went on to represent the country at the Central America Biennial in Panama in 2010, and his work has entered the collection of the Flint Institute of Arts.