MONA MARZOUK’s interest in architectural histories is visible in many of her works – in painting, sculpture as well as site-specific murals and paintings. Blurring the boundary between past and present day, man-made and natural, biomorphic and geometrical, personal and political, beautiful and ugly, and masculine and feminine, Marzouk redefines how we see the world.
With the sensibility of a maverick architect, Marzouk envisions aesthetic systems that draw on a diversity of cultural traditions but which can only exist in the realm of the imagination. Her early paintings and sculptures reassemble disparate architectural elements from history as well as animal and body parts to construct unified compositions. Castles and cathedrals, crenellations and crustaceans merge together in fluid form. Her compositions, which often float in the center of a frame, reference post-minimalism, with their hard edges and flat expanses of solid color.
Her later works take on a more menacing and aggressive quality. Strong saturated colors and the introduction of black replace a pale bi-chromatic palette. Through imaginative studies of objects such as flags and helmets, Marzouk tackles politically loaded themes such as war, sports, nationhood, space technology and oil industry and how they habitually manifest themselves in our daily life. With a whimsical touch, her work pulls us into a futuristic, mythological universe compelling us to forge unexpected relationships between what is otherwise familiar or ordinary.
CV
Works
- The Cannibal Paradox, 2025
- Strange Comforts, 2023
- Apparatus and Form, 2022
- BARK, 2018
- RENEWAL, 2015
- TRAYVON, 2014
- The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Energy's 'Evil', 2008
- The New World, 2006
- Helmets, 2005