Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca - Relli ( born June 5, 1913 in Boston, Massachusetts ( USA) as Corrado Marcarelli, † 29 August 2000 in Parma, Italy ) was an American painter of Italian descent. He was one of the most important and early representatives of Abstract Expressionism, the New York School.

Conrad Marca - Relli and his family moved in 1927 to New York and attended initially a private painting school. From 1930 he studied art at the " Cooper Union Institute " in New York. From 1935 to 1938 he worked for the WPA (Works Progress Administration - Federal Art Project ) and came up with the artists Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and John Graham in contact.

After his military service in World War II he was a member of the "Downtown Group" in New York and the avant-garde scene of Greenwich Village artists. He was a founding member in 1949 of the "Artists ' Club " in New York. In 1948 he had his first solo exhibition in New York.

Conrad Marca - Relli made ​​the collage, its preferred visual language to a high art. He developed his images of early Patchwork studies on complex paintings to monumental, abstract expressionist collages, which also contained other materials, such as plastics and metals.

In the fifties his art got international attention: In 1956, Marca - Relli was a participant of the XXVIII. Venice Biennale in the American Pavilion ( subject: " American artists paint the city" ) and in 1959 his works were exhibited at documenta 2 in Kassel with.

Marca - Relli was a lecturer at Yale University from 1954 to 1955 and from 1959 to 1960 at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1967, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a major retrospective of his art.

Since 1953 he has lived in his house in the vicinity of Jackson Pollock in Springs, a hamlet of East Hampton ( New York). With increasing artistic success, he began to distance himself from the New York School. In his last years he moved with his wife Anita Gibson to Parma in Italy, where he lived until his death in 2000 and worked.