ARTIST OVERVIEW

Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000) began his artistic career as a painter. Today, however, he is recognized as one of the American masters of collage, and the first to raise the medium to a scale and complexity comparable to monumental painting.

Born in Boston to Italian immigrants, Marca-Relli was primarily self-taught. He did supplement his education with private art classes during high school and a year of study at Cooper Union before establishing a studio in Greenwich Village. Early in his career, his style was largely influenced by European surrealism, specifically De Chirico and Miró. By the 1940s, however, Marca-Relli had turned to abstraction, a move influenced by his contact with Willem de Kooning (with whom he would later share a studio), Franz Kline, John Graham, and others whom Marca-Relli met during his work on the WPA's Federal Art project. An active participant in New York's downtown avant-garde, Marca-Relli helped establish the Eighth Street Club, an artists' group whose members included de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jack Tworkov, and assisted legendary dealer Leo Castelli in the organization of the first “Ninth Street Show,” arguably the first comprehensive public exhibition of abstract expressionist work. By the end of the decade, Marca-Relli had achieved significant critical recognition as an abstract painter in New York.

In 1952, Marca-Relli traveled to Mexico. Inspired by the effects of sunlight on adobe brick buildings and faced with a lack of paint, it was there that he first began to experiment with collage technique. He soon found that collage afforded him the ability to work quickly and fluidly, and, as a result, his compositions became more complex and dynamic, including references to architectural, figurative, and landscape motifs. Initially, he sketched forms onto bare canvas then cut them out and pinned them to a supporting ground. Carefully structuring the elements, he employed rich colors, broken surfaces and expressionistic spattering. Over the years, the collages developed an abstract simplicity, evidenced by black or somber colors and rectangular shapes isolated against a neutral backdrop. By the 1960s, the artist began to incorporate new materials, including metals and plastics, into these works. In 1967, the Whitney Museum of American Art honored him with a retrospective. In the show catalogue, William Agee wrote, "Marca-Relli…developed [collage] as a complete pictorial system essentially without precedent in modern art…[He] has extended collage to the point where it now carries its own full and distinct range of formal and emotive means."

Over time, Marca-Relli removed himself from the New York School, living and working abroad in a number of different countries, most notably Spain and Italy. He and his wife eventually settled in Parma, Italy, and in 1999, one year before his death, he became an honorary Italian citizen. Marca-Relli's work can be found in major museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.