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.

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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
    
    
    
    
    
    

The Morphologist & the Architect, 2004

Index

Acrylic on canvas

This series of paintings represents an attempt to enter areas of historical association previously unvisited. Instead of depending solely on architectural elements borrowed from different historical eras, in this series I turn to the world of fabulous and mythical creatures for inspiration.

In ancient times, fabulous creatures were designed to illustrate a certain narrative, a narrative that benefited “the system” in control. The creatures however, do not illustrate any particular narrative. They are a new breed of mythical creature, a species born in the 21st century where a “supermarket mentality” prevails. Unlike their predecessors, they are torn between two epochs. Concept wise they can be related to ancient times, while in form, structure and color they are surely post-modern. This might be the reason that they seem isolated and contained, each species struggles to bridge the gap between the past and the present. The pale, muted color schemes in most of the paintings work to give the viewer a sense of the sublime. However, the colors are mixed with iridescent paint that gives off an almost neon quality. The “Tinsel town” sublimity is balanced by the deliberate use of humor and Irony in most of the paintings. In one of the larger canvases a glittering burgundy figure is placed against a bluish grey background. The female figure is topped with a crown and has around eight or nine udder shaped protrusions springing out of its corpus. The plentitude of udders suggests excessiveness a trait associated with royalty, but also related to contemporary “consumerist mentality”. In another painting, what seems to be a sea mammal is crawling towards an unseen destination guided by its quirky looking antenna. The architectural elements so clearly visible in the previous work are morphed to subtly blend in with reconstructed animal and insect forms. But, in a few obvious paintings architectural elements can still be clearly recognized. This is because these paintings were the first to be created from the series. As the series developed, it broadened the ability to morph and restructure.

©2026 Mona Marzouk