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• Conrad Marca-Relli

"The artist can only think in terms of self-expression, of personal contributions, or of discovery." Conrad Marca-Relli

One of the most important exponents of American Abstract Expressionism, Marca-Relli (born in Boston of Italian parents) characterizes an artist free of constraints, a kind of ‘nomad’ of post-war painting. He started painting in the 1930s and began his public career as a surrealist painter influenced by de Chirico, Rousseau and Miro. Had his first solo exhibition in 1947 in New York. From this year he began traveling extensively, forging links between Europe’s artistic circles and American Abstract Expressionism. Together with some of his artist friends, among them Rothko, Kline and de Kooning, he founded the Eighth Street Club, while at the same time promoting the exhibition of the Abstract Expressionists of the Ninth Street Club, the cradle of the movement of the heterogeneous group of artists who were to represent the new avant-garde of American abstraction.

After a sojourn in Europe, introducing Abstract Expressionism at a time when European interest in Americans art was growing, Marca-Relli returned to the States. While in Rome he had met several Italian artists and in particular Afro and Burri, with whom he remained in close contact. In 1953 Marca-Relli moved to East Hampton, Long Island, where he became a close friend of his neighbour, Jackson Pollock, and where he lived for approximately fifteen years, in the period in which the township became the focal point of New York’s art world.
During the 1950s and 60s the artist enjoyed increasing recognition, winning, for example, the Logan Medal of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954, becoming a Visiting Critic at Yale in 1954/5 and a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958. These decades were important in terms of exhibitions and of ever more frequent travels, evidence of a personality constantly in search of new stimuli and inspiration. This nomadism was consecrated by the major solo-exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1967, which established Marca-Relli as one of the leading representatives of the new American abstraction. His typical isolation and independence from the rest of the group was underscored by the fact that Marca-Relli had two studios, one in East Hampton and one in Ibiza, where he painted a series of canvases particularly influenced by his travels and by the landscape of the Spanish peninsula, which he visited frequently. Yet despite his desire for solitude, the artist continued to exhibit with his friends, among them Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell. Perceived as a key figure of a specific moment in the development of American painting, Marca-Relli’s works are represented in the major private and public collections of the United States, including the major New York museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (which already has four of his works), and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Moving to Italy in 1997, Marca-Relli’s art remains still to be discovered.

Winter Blue , a mixed-media canvas painted in 1982, is an example of the artist's later, more lyrical work. While abstract in its overall feeling, the work maintains an attachment to the representational world, and pays homage to the tradition of landscape painting.
Marca-Relli continues to work and paint at the age of 85, and currently resides and works in Italy.

text is taken from: © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice,
or visit their website @: GUGGENHEIM MUSEUMS 

Initially, Marca-Relli applied collage to a series of single figure studies. The anatomy of the body and the spaces around it merge and become the "architecture" of space. The individual figures are sometimes lying down, sleeping or seated. These early collages were created from segments of either raw canvas or natural linen that were pinned to the supporting canvas after they had been coated with a mixture of black paint and glue. Later, he introduced two figures to increase the complexity and expressiveness of his work. Most of these works are large, accentuating the structural quality of the human form. Soon after he introduced volumes of color to his work.

In 1958 Marca-Relli spent a few months in the south of France. While there, his work embodied the sharp contrasts and greater translucence of the Mediterranean light. He also reduced the number of colors to concentrate on the contrast between one dominant hue with strong blacks and whites.

By 1961 his works show an austerity of color and were limited to gradations of one predominant, resonant hue. Contrasts were emphasized by the tracing of simulated rivet holes and white lines to divide and re-form additional areas and planes. The evident hardness in the collages showed a renewed urge to discover again the substance and tangibility of materials, the impulse that had originally led Marca-Relli to collage years earlier. In his work about Marca-Relli, William C. Agee, one-time Assistance Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, wrote,

"Canvas had become almost too pliable, and Marca-Relli now searched for materials which would offer a greater resiliency to the hand. In 1961 he used thin sheets of metal in several small collages, but metal at that time proved too awkward and inflexible. The next year he discovered in sheets of vinyl plastic the right combination of resistance and flexibility. Works in 1962...use vinyl sheets nailed directly to a wooden support. Following his innate tendency to formal reduction and simplicity, the shapes gradually cast off traces of biomorphism and became progressively fewer in number, larger and more open. 'Cristobal' and other later works in this series assumed a planar arrangement of horizontal and vertical shapes . . . Volumes of color were added as contrasts to the more neutral and open areas of the natural shades of vinyl. These color volumes also provided a weight which nudges against and displaces other shapes, creating a slow internal rhythm. That rhythm is irregular and off-beat, caused in art by a deliberate awkwardness in cutting and attaching the plastic."

Marca-Relli expanded his use of industrial material to aluminum. Ultimately, he began to work in three-dimensional space creating reliefs and freestanding sculptures. After exploring the possibilities of plastics and aluminum, Marca-Relli returned to paint and canvas as the materials of his collages.

The body of Marca-Relli's work is evidence of his inward and outward journeys. Marca-Relli does not see himself as a maker of pictures, but as a seeker, an experimenter, a problem-solver. And although he has friends and affiliations, he listened to only one voice in his creative process, his own. He said, "I think painters should be free to experiment. And that during their experimenting they should be alone, without any interference . . . in order to see whether what they are doing is good or not."

text is taken from: © KARLIE Corporation
or visit their website @: http://www.karlie.com/art/marca-relli/marca-relli.html 

'Winter Blue', 1982, mixed media on canvas,

 

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