Uncovering and depicting political economic power systems became one of the main themes of the artist Mark Lombardi, who died in New York in 2000.
His complex organigrams, which sometimes contain up to 300 names of corporations, CEOs and political representatives, are often based on years of research. Although he did not officially join the worldwide anti-globalization movement, Mark Lombardi was always concerned with depicting as simply as possible the existing global networks of arms smugglers and money launderers and the organization of their mafia-like structures that reach into the highest levels of politics.
He became aware of the apparent omnipresence of these and similar scandals in the course of studying art history at the Syracuse University. For an exhibition about the Watergate scandal, he began searching through files in the seventies and soon started looking specifically for political literature.
In addition to theoretical texts, such as Herbert Marcuse who was important for the intellectual segment of the 1968 generation, Lombardi also read specialized literature, for example about international arms dealing, the internal organization of the CIA or George W. Bush sen. From this accumulated knowledge, he prepared an extensive system of index cards, which soon contained several thousand individual biographies and detailed diagrams.
Without the support of computer programs, Lombardi developed a new form of depicting history on the basis of this fundamental research. Using pencil drawings, Mark Lombardi sought to make highly complex connections comprehensible as power-political concatenations by means of arrows and connecting lines attached to countless names. To protect himself from prosecution - as he said - and as a safeguard against his critics, he used almost exclusively publicly accessible and secured source material.
The drawing works by the artist, born in 1951 in Syracuse, New York, are comparable with the political work of contemporary artists such as Hans Haacke or Öyvind Fahlström. Following a serious personal crisis, the artist was found hanged in his studio in April 2000.