Marca-Relli: Collages in Black and White
Reception: Saturday, June 22nd 1996
"During four decades, Marca-Relli has been remarkably faithful to his basic medium of collage-painting. Though predominantly working in earth colors, he has sometimes introduced other colors and has used collage materials besides canvas, the present sampling, a very miniretrospective, excludes other colors and materials.
From early on, Marca-Relli used the human figure or parts of it as his vocabulary of forms - heads, limbs, torsos, bits and pieces cut from
the whole, often to represent the whole. The "Windmill" of 1972 and
"My Brother's Keeper" of 1985, hold us in their powerful grip - the
interlocking fingers once more a metaphor for the connecting of forms. And now, a decade after these mid-eighties collages, improvisations on a reclining nude again emphasize Marca-Relli's continuous themes of energy seen in a pulsating field and containment expressed in monumental forms. At eighty-three, Marca-Relli is one of the few distinguished survivors of a great tradition."
- B.H. Friedman
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Who Was Conrad Marca-Relli?
B. 1913 – 2000
Conrad Marca-Relli (born Corrado Marcarelli) was an American artist who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionist artists whose artistic innovation by the 1950s had been recognized across the Atlantic, including Paris. New York School Abstract Expressionism, represented by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, Marca-Relli and others became a leading art movement of the postwar era.
Marcarelli (he changed the spelling later in life) was born in Boston. His parents Cosimo and Genovina Marcarelli were Italian immigrants from Benevento. Marcarelli moved to New York City when he was 13 where he grew up with his brother Ettore, and sisters Dora and Ida. In 1930 he studied at the Cooper Union for a year. And a year later he opened his own studio in New York and managed to earn an income by teaching and producing occasional illustrations for the daily and weekly press.
After the Second World War Marca-Relli joined the "Downtown Group" which represented group of artists who found studios in lower Manhattan in the area bounded by 8th and 12th street between First and Sixth Avenues during the late 1940s and early 1950s. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was actively involved in the avant-garde art world in Greenwich Village. These artists were called the "Downtown Group" as opposed to the "Uptown Group" established during the war at The Art of This Century Gallery.