Conrad Marca-Relli - Il Maestro Irascibile

Galleria #mattiadeluca is proud to present #conradmarcarelli - Il Maestro Irascibile (The Irascible Master), an exhibition entirely dedicated to the Italian-American artist, a key gure of American Abstract Expressionism. After the historic exhibition at the Galleria La Tartaruga in 1957, this rst Roman retrospective, organised in collaboration with the Marca-Relli Archive, will be inaugurated on Saturday, 9 October 2021, on the premises of the Palazzo Albertoni Spinola at 2 Piazza di Campitelli, Rome.

Conrad Marca-Relli, aka Corrado Marcarelli, was born in Boston on 5 June 1913 to Italian parents from the Campania region. An indomitable spirit and a tireless traveller, Marca-Relli grew up travelling continuously to Italy, making him perfectly bilingual, literally and artistically speaking. A lover of the monumentality of Rome, where he worked for several years, and of great Italian Renaissance painting, the Italian-American artist was the true classicist soul of the New York School. The birth of the Eighth Street Club and the organization of the famous 1951 Ninth Street Show is attributable to his fervent temperament. Marca-Relli, imbued not only with classical culture, but also with a certain pragmatism of American origin, undertook from the 1950s a successful and endless path of research into the collage technique. The compositional results of this research would be brought to the ultimate outcome of speaking of his art as “painting-collage”. This modus operandi emerged as a balanced combination of compositional harmony, typical of the European tradition, a spontaneity of gesture, the offspring of Rosenberg’s arena, and Action painting: raw canvases were cut with a razor blade, the strips glued together, unglued, rearranged, superimposed, layered on the support and, nally, repainted in order to harmonize the duality of “positive” and “negative” spaces. It is this primitive encounter of two opposing forces that brings to life Marca-Relli’s canvases, palimpsest collages created by an equally reasoned and “neurasthenic” gesture, a denition given by Afro Basaldella to the artist in a letter sent to his friend and colleague Toti Scialoja.

Always departing from the classical proportions of the wooden mannequin, inseparable companion of his painting, Marca-Relli created a macrocosm of seemingly abstract signs, main elements of his major artistic achievements, on display at #galleriamattiadeluca. From plain Cityscapes with a metaphysical avour of the early 1950s, to the enigmatic seated gures of his early collages, and up to the homage to his friend and neighbour Jackson Pollock, the exhibition traces the strong impact of Marca-Relli as a person and as an artist on the American and international scene. You will be able to appreciate the works of the calibre of Cityscape from 1953, an oil on canvas, which was inspired by the artist’s Mexican sojourns and is a turning point for his adoption of the collage technique.

Further information in the press release to download