Conrad Marca-Relli was born in 1913 in Boston, New York and died in 2000 in Parma, Italy.

Involved in the New York Art scene from an early age, Marca-Relli went on to study at Cooper Union, and the WPA before going into the Military Service.

Considered one of the main exponents of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, he was involved in the first Abstract Expressionist show at the Ninth Street Show in 1951 with Franz Klein and gallerist Leo Castelli, marking the beginning of the unique America artistic movement alongside Pollock, de Kooning, Guston, Newman, Hoffman and Motherwell. Often considered the link between European and American cultures, he combines the dramatic effects of Abstract Expressionism with the sense of order that can be found in Italian Renaissance painting.

He considered collage as an art form equal to painting, something that allowed Marca-Relli to continuously change and develop, first by overlapping layers of paper and canvas and from the 1960’s metal plates, without ever losing its freshness. He used collage to delineate volumes and to create large canvases in which the figure remains dominant. Marca-Relli’s collages were applauded and revered from the start and in 1954, the Museum of Modern Art, New York The Guggenheim, and The Whitney all acquired a work by the artist. In 1956, he participated in the Venice Biennale followed by Documenta II in Kassel in 1959. The first major retrospective of his work was in 1967 at The Whitney in New York.

Collections include: High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Denver Art Museum, CO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NYC; Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, PA; San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, among many others.

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