In the years 2015-2021, he studied painting at VŠVU in Bratislava (Prof. Daniel Fisher, Prof. Ivan Csudai). In 2020, while still a student, he presented himself at the Bratislava City Gallery with the solo exhibition Silentium, and in 2022 he presented himself at the Léthé solo exhibition in the Nitra Gallery. It is represented in private collections at home and abroad. He lives and works in Bratislava. In his work (as well as his technique), Richard Marco turns to classical realist painting, finding inspiration in a wide range of art history. He looks for original impulses in the old masters (mythological, biblical themes). However, he is not retrograde in his interest - he enlivens his own painting program with lessons from photorealism, author's techniques (such as disrupting a perfect painting with a solvent), the use of modern digital technologies, as well as shifts in the narrative plane. He is permanently fascinated by the theme of transience, mortality, mythical reliving. This is also why he works programmatically with (realistic) motifs that touch on temporality and finitude. With his work, he also comments on current topics (he is involved, but not primarily) and codes his paintings in his own way; in his latest works, he combines a classically conceived portrait, or a fragment of a human body, with specific historical events of Central Europe. Competition debutant Richard Marco in his work The Midas Stigmata III. (2023) depicts two hands - a detail of the palms in which he places period coins of the Slovak Fascist State and the German Third Reich. It thus opens a dialogue between collective memory and the collaborative history of one's own home. He sees coins as a precise, defining symbol of place and time, but also as a placeholder for greed, obedience and blindness to evil. This parallel offers lessons, or a warning to the moral dilemmas of today. The mythological parable of King Midas, whose own greed almost led to his death, connects Marco with the first Slovak Republic. The totalitarian regime, through racial legislation, enabled the persecution, deprivation of dignity, property and citizenship, and finally the deportation of Jews. In the first wave in 1942, 58,000 people were deported to German concentration camps for a fee of 500 marks per person, while Slovakia was the only non-occupied country that deported Jews voluntarily.