Untitled

View Similar Items

Megan Klim - Sculptural Wall Art: 'Woven #3'

Mathilde Lefort - Mathilde lefort Mirror II - Iron and Cement on canvas

Mathilde Lefort - Mathilde lefort Prophecy - Ink, gold powder and iron on canvas

Mathilde Lefort - Mathilde lefort 888 Hz - Iron and Cement on canvas

David Hardaker - "Pearly Dewdrops 4" Contemporary Colorful Abstract Circular Painting

David Hardaker - "Kool Thing" Contemporary Abstract Gray and White Concentric Circle Painting

David Hardaker - "Pink Steam" Contemporary Abstract Gray and White Concentric Circle Painting

David Hardaker - "Hot Patootle" Contemporary Abstract Colorful Concentric Circle Painting

David Hardaker - "Firestarter" Contemporary Abstract Green & White Concentric Circle Painting

David Hardaker - "Threads" Contemporary Abstract Blue, Pink, & White Concentric Circle Painting

David Hardaker - "Crazy Water" Contemporary Abstract Blue & White Concentric Circle Painting

Santiago Fuentes Bo - "Hope & Tragedies" Surrealist Urban Street Art Mixed Media Painting on Wood

Want more images or videos?

Request additional images or videos from the seller

1 of 7

Conrad Marca-Relli 1
Untitled
1967

About the Item

Signed lower right and number 12/30 lower left. Conrad Marca-Relli, an American artist linked to Abstract Expressionism and known for making large patchwork collages of cut pieces of canvas, died Tuesday at his home in Parma, Italy. He was 87. In 1967, when the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a retrospective of Mr. Marca-Relli's work, the show's curator, William Agee, said, "Marca-Relli's achievement has been to raise collage to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting." John Canaday, reviewing the show in The New York Times, described the artist's "success in bringing restlessly energetic forms into static position without deadening them, his strong echoes of classical architecture as filtered through the Italian Renaissance, and his increasing interest in high polish." Born in Boston in 1913, Mr. Marca-Relli was the son of a journalist whose assignments abroad allowed the family to spend years in Europe. Mr. Marca-Relli had his first art lessons as a boy in Italy. In the United States, he attended Cooper Union briefly and then, at 18, struck out on his own. He taught art, worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines and joined the Federal Art Project of the W.P.A., through which he met Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and John Graham. His acquaintance with them helped familiarize him with modernism. After serving in the Army, he had his first solo show in New York in 1947: surreal dreamscapes with circus themes and allusions to Italian Renaissance buildings, influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. He then switched to thickly painted, agitated abstractions, affected by an exhibition he had seen of the painter Arshile Gorky. But he was dissatisfied. He had a breakthrough in Mexico during the summer of 1953, when, having run out of paint, he started making collages from what was at hand. Returning to the United States and inspired by de Kooning's Women, Mr. Marca-Relli began a series of abstract collages based on human figures. These jigsaw collages consisted of raw canvas or linen stuck like shingles to a larger canvas and then painted. He described his goal as bringing accident and gesture, qualities of Abstract Expressionism, to the usually methodical medium of collage. He cut shapes quickly, intuitively. The idea was not "speed for its own sake, but to create through free, automatic action, before conscious thought can censor out creativity," he said. During the 1960's he applied the technique to metal and vinyl, creating works alluding to wings, fuselages and airplanes, and this activity led him to make sculptures before returning to canvas and paint. Painting, he said, is "a continuous attempt at solving insoluble problems." "You just keep working and you never get it clear to yourself," he added. Mr. Marca-Relli made intense small-scale abstractions and bigger figurative collages in the 70's . . . His palette, typically somber, broadened, and for a while he even experimented with spray paint, but without undoing his essential European-inflected elegance, which was a virtue to supporters, a weakness to detractors, who complained occasionally about what one critic called "secondhand sumptuousness." He was elegant in person, known among friends as a restless, charming hypochondriac. Writers stressed his fondness for fast cars. In 1951 he married Anita Gibson, a Peruvian and the daughter of Percy Gibson, the poet. Over the years they lived in East Hampton, N.Y., where he became a close friend and neighbor of Jackson Pollock; and also in Wayne, N.J.; Ibiza, Spain; Sarasota, Fla.; Rome; Paris; and London. The couple moved to Parma four years ago. Mr. Marca-Relli's work was frequently shown and collected. Among recent exhibitions were a survey last year at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and another this year in Darmstadt, Germany. Last year he was made an honorary citizen of Italy. Source: askart.

Creator:
Conrad Marca-Relli 1 (1913 - 2000, American)
Creation Year:
1967
Dimensions:
Height: 18 in (45.72 cm)Width: 18 in (45.72 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
Medium:
Metal
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
1960-1969
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Saratoga Springs, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU1702619922

Shop All Conrad Marca-Relli 1

Conrad Marca-Relli 1

Conrad Marca-Relli, son of Italian parents was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1913 and is considered the father of the New York abstract expressionism. In 1930 he studied design at the Cooper Union for one year and worked for the Works Progress Administration until 1940. Conrad Marca-Relli served for the U.S. Army during World War II for four years, from 1941 to 1945. Till then, the work of Mark-Relli was characterized by his depictions of circus-themed or urban and architectural landscapes, the result of the influence of Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. During the latest years of the 40’s, he returned to Manhattan and took part along with other artists, most of them war veterans, the "Downtown group" whose workshop was in Greenwich Village. In 1949 this group formed the New York School, in which artists like Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg were also part of, and who dedicated its existence to explore the avant-garde of the moment. In 1948, Conrad Marca-Relli showed his work to the public for the first time in an exhibition organized by Leo Castelli called "Ninth Street Show”, considered as the first exhibition of abstract expressionism. During the era of the 50s, Marca-Relli definitely explores abstraction and combines it with elaborated collages. It is said that Mark-Relli began working the art of collage due to lack of paint, and then discovered how to represent some light effects like the reflection in certain surfaces such as adobe. As he was investigating this technique, his works were became increasingly complex, in the use of colors, shapes and textures. In these years, Marca-Relli taught at Yale University and bought a house at the Springs, in the vicinity of East Hampton, a community that began to develop as an artist colony. Interestingly, the home of Marca-Relli was beside Pollock’s, with whom he became close friends. It would be Marca-Relli himself who identified the body of his friend to the police the day of his death. In the 60s, Marca-Relli uses industrial vinyl to give texture to his works and shapes are outlined with painted, or real nails, emphasizing the three dimensional plasticity. In 1967 he received his first retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. Conrad Marca-Relli died in 2000 after living in cities like London, Paris, Ibiza and Parma.