Born in Rimini in 1960, while still very young Marco Petrus moved to Milan with his family. In 1980, he graduated as a graphic assistant at the Umanitaria, and in 1984 he graduated from arts high school. During his formative years, Petrus cultivated an interest in architecture and experiments related to printing techniques and artistic reproduction. Following the death of his father, he opened an art print shop that would become a point of reference for many artists.
In 1991 Marco Petrus made his debut as a painter with a solo exhibition in Milan. His main theme was architecture, and this approach would earn him first the awarding of the 20th Sulmona Prize and then of the San Carlo Borromeo Prize.
In his initial artistic phase, his works were characterized by a strong attachment to the stroke, which stems from his experience as an engraver. Already in his early paintings, however, his passion and interest in architecture emerges. This path would lead the artist to gradually abandon the stroke and to embrace well-defined lines and flat backgrounds
Around the turn of the millennium, Marco Petrus underwent an artistic evolution focusing on an increasingly rigorous analysis of the structure of urban and architectural forms. On canvas, this artistic evolution led to an increasing stylization of form. Petrus’s painting thus disengages from the representation of elements and glimpses of the urban landscape, thereby embracing research into pure architectural form.
The year 2003 represents another year of particular note in the artist’s career, when, with the exhibition London Suspended at the Barbara Behan Contemporary Art Gallery in London, he crossed his national borders with his first solo exhibition abroad. It is precisely these early experiences abroad that would mark Petrus’s works: Milan, which—ever since the beginning of Petrus’s artistic production—had been his sole artistic subject, has now been joined by other cities such as Trieste and Shanghai. Despite this broadening horizon, Milan remains the symbolic city of Marco Petrus’s entire artistic production.