Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli (born Corrado Marcarelli; June 5, 1913 – August 29, 2000) 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.

Biography 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. He later supported himself by working for the Works Progress Administration, first as a teacher and then with mural painting divisions of the Federal Art Project during this period he won the Logan Medal of the Arts. He served in the US Army military service during World War II (1941–1945).

Marca-Relli taught at Yale University from 1954 to 1955 and from 1959 to 1960, and at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1953, he bought a house near Jackson Pollock's home in Springs, East Hampton. As his career progressed, he increasingly distanced himself from the New York School.

He lived and worked in many countries around the world, eventually settling in Parma, Italy with his wife, Anita Gibson, whom he married in 1951. Conrad Marca-Relli died on August 29, 2000, in Parma, at the age of 87.

Career After the 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.

His first one-man show was in New York City in 1948. In 1949 Marca-Relli was among the founders of the "Artists' Club" located at 39 East 8th Street. He was selected by his fellow artists to show in the Ninth Street Show held on May 21 to June 10, 1951. The show was located at 60 East 9th Street on the first floor and the basement of a building which was about to be demolished.

The artists celebrated not only the appearance of the dealers, collectors and museum people on the 9th Street, and the consequent exposure of their work but they celebrated the creation and the strength of a living community of significant dimensions.

Conrad Marca-Relli was among the 24 out of a total 256 New York School artists included in the Ninth Street Show and in all the following New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals from 1953 to 1957. These Annuals were important because the participants were chosen by the artists themselves.

Marca-Relli's early cityscapes, still lifes, circus themes and architectural motifs are reminiscent of Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Throughout his career, Marca-Relli created monumental-scale collages. He combined oil painting and collage, employing intense colors, broken surfaces and expressionistic spattering. He also experimented with metal and vinyl materials. Over the years the collages developed an abstract simplicity, evidenced by black or somber colors and rectangular shapes isolated against a neutral backdrop.

In 1967, the Whitney Museum of American Art gave him a retrospective show.

The Archivio Marca-Relli, which was established by the artist and Galleria d'arte Niccoli in Parma in 1997, collects information about Conrad Marca-Relli and archives his work for a future general catalogue.

Exhibitions

1947, 1949, 1951: Niveau Gallery, New York City 1948-1949: Galleria Il Cortile, Rome 1953, 1956, 1958: Stable Gallery, New York City 1956: Frank Perls Gallery, Los Angeles & Hollywood 1957: Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome 1957, 1962:Galleria del Naviglio, Milan 1959, 1960–1964: Kootz Gallery, New York City 1960: Sharon Playhouse Gallery, Sharon, Connecticut 1961: Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf; Bolles Gallery, San Francisco; Joan Peterson Gallery, Boston; Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo, Lima 1962: Galerie de France, Paris; 1963: Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zürich; Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo 1965: Galería Bonino, Buenos Aires 1967: James David Gallery, Coral Gables, Florida; Makler Gallery, Philadelphia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 1968: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Alpha Gallery, Boston; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York 1969: Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Reed College, Portland, Oregon 1970: University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, Maryland; Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida 1970, 1975, 1979: Marlborough Gallery, New York City 1971: Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf; Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Lowe Art Museum at University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida 1972, 1975: Galería Carl Van der Voort, Ibiza 1973: Galería Ynguanzo, Madrid; Galerie Numaga, Auvernier, Neuchâtel; Galerie Bahlsen, Berlin 1974, Marlborough Galerie, Zürich; Makler Gallery, Philadelphia 1975, Marlborough-Goddard Gallery, Toronto and Montreal 1977, Galería Lanzenberg, Ibiza; Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, New York City 1978, Galería Joan Prats, Barcelona 1978–1979: Carone Gallery, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 1979: Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Fort Lauderdale, Florida 1979–1980: John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida 1981: Hokin Gallery, Chicago 1982: Phoenix Gallery, Washington, D.C.; G.M.B. Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan 1983: Alex Rosenberg Gallery, New York City 1985–1987, 1989, 1991: Marisa del Re Gallery, New York City 1986: R.H. Love Gallery, Chicago 1990: Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona 1990: 2002: Galleria d'Arte Niccoli, Parma 1996: Vered Gallery, East Hampton, New York 1998: Fondazione Peggy Guggenheim, Venice 2000: Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt 2002: Galleria d'arte Niccoli, Parma 2004: Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York City; Galleria Open Art, Prato 2006: Lagorio Arte Contemporanea, Brescia 2008: Rotonda della Besana, Milan 2008: Fort Lauderdale (Florida), Museum of Art 2009: Knoedler & Company Gallery, New York City 2010: Galleria d'arte Bergamo, Bergamo 2011: Knoedler & Company Gallery, New York City 2011: Pollock Krasner House&Study Center, East Hampton 2012: Ronchini Gallery, London 2016: Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York City 2016: Galleria Open Art, Prato 2016: Repetto Gallery, London 2017: Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York 2018: De Primi Fine Art, Lugano 2019: Artefiera, Bologna (monographic booth) 2019: Ronchini Gallery, London

Works in museums and public collections

James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas Museu d'Art Contemporani MACBA, Barcelona University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California Sammlung Reinhard Onnasch, Berlin Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art and Archaeology, Columbia, Missouri University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida Denver Art Museum, Denver Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, Florida Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, NY Museum of Modern Art, New York City Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City Collection of the Chase Manhattan Bank, New York City Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, Oklahoma Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri St. Paul Gallery of Art, Saint Paul, Minnesota Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York Fondazione Peggy Guggenheim, Venice Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine