MONA MARZOUK

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.

Email
CV

Works

1. The Cannibal Paradox, 2025
   
2. Strange Comforts, 2023
   
3. Apparatus and Form, 2022
4. BARK, 2018
   
5. RENEWAL, 2015 & 2017
   
6. TRAYVON, 2014
   
7. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Energy's 'Evil', 2008
   
8. The New World, 2006
   
9. Helmets, 2005
   
10. The Morphologist & the Architect, 2004
    
    
    
    
    
    

RENEWAL, 2015 & 2017

Index

Villa Romana, Florence, Italy (2015) & NiMAC, Nicosia, Cyprus (2017)

Mural, Acrylic paints

Photographer (2015): Elzbieta Bialkowska

Once upon a time, the Medici family ruled over the republic of Florence for many generations. This project takes inspiration from the history of the Medici period bringing it into parallels with the present.

The ruthlessness of the Medici's and their hunger for power was insatiable yet their dedication to the advancement of knowledge, art, and science was prolific. Supporting the most prodigious artists and scientists of their time their contribution helped pave the way for the Copernican Revolution yet they committed countless crimes and inspired the world’s most famous treatise on political realism, Machevelli's 'The Prince'. They survived revolts, coups, and long exiles only to remerge in renewed form as powerful clergy. Their capacity for renewal was commemorated by one of their later members in a new family motto RENOVABITVR (Renewal) inscribed around the image of a wheel with a long nail hammered into the top of its rim. Like a nail stuck into the material of time itself their powerful presence will be felt and their contributions to the advancement of mankind will not go unnoticed.  Today they have renewed themselves once again, they are our enemy, they are our patrons, they are the infrastructure through which our data passes and through which we progress, and they are the surveillance technologies that can capture our every move. They are the high-tech labs that are working to rid us of malicious inherited diseases in the future and the financial powers that seek to bind our healthcare to the rules of profit. You will find the Medici legacy in the entanglement of these forms, prepared as ever for renewal. 



Installation views at Villa Romana, 2015


Installation views at NiMAC, 2017

©2026 Mona Marzouk