U R B A N L A N D S C A P E

Close Up, 2018–23
Oil on canvas
80 x 120 cm

The congested urban landscape has been a crucial and paradoxical subject for Marco Minozzi over the past decade, as it simultaneously mirrors the artist’s direct observation of spaces he inhabits and spaces he imagines, tapping into their benefits and faults. These paintings also remain connected to a broad range of art-historical instances of the pictorial representation of the city through diverse styles and contents, recalling such works as Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco Effects of Good Government in the City and the Country (1338-39) in the Sala della Pace in Palazzo Pubblico in Siena and Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s oil-on-wood painting titled The Tower of Babel (circa 1563) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Such historical landscapes and those by Minozzi address, through their own contexts, forms of civic order and “human-induced degradation” that alarmingly threatens the natural world, its species and mankind’s habitat, to borrow the phrase from the architectural theorist and urbanist Rem Koolhaas.*