Painter using richly coloured impasto, strongly gestural marks and an overlying black linear image. He was born in Leeds, Yorkshire and studied at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art, 1982–6, gaining an honours degree in fine art. Teachers included Harry Thubron, Albert Irvin, Basil Beattie and Michael Craig-Martin. Was included in Young British Artist IV at Saatchi Gallery, 1995, where such pictures as Half Way Up, Julie From Hull, Reader’s Wife 1 and My Arse Is Yours contained frequent references to the female nude, knickers and bottoms.

In 1997, Harvey’s portrait of the Moors child murderer Myra Hindley, made using casts of a child’s hand prints, prompted outrage when exhibited at the RA in Sensation: British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, being kicked and splattered with eggs and ink. Later group exhibitions included Happy the World so Made, The Nunnery, 2001; Closer, Standpoint Gallery, 2002; and London Calling. Young British Artists Criss-Crossed, Galleri Kaare Berntsen, Oslo, Norway, 2005. Among Harvey’s later solo shows were Vedovi Fine Art, Brussels, Belgium, and Mary Boone Gallery, New York, America, both 2002, and The Führer’s Cakes, Galleria Marabini, Bologna, and Marcus Harvey at Mimmo Scognamiglio, Naples, both in Italy in 2005. Harvey lived in London.

^{Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)}