Conrad Marca-Relli, The prodigy of collage

Repetto Gallery is glad to announce its new exhibition The prodigy of collage, an homage to
Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000), in collaboration with Archivio Marca-Relli. About ten
artworks, realised between 1955 and 1979, will be exposed during the show. For the
occasion, David Anfam, art historian and co-curator of the abstract expressionism show at the
Royal Academy, will give a speech during the opening reception.
In 1948, Conrad Marca-Relli arrived in Rome, where he met Alberto Burri and Afro
Basaldella. Between the lyric chromatism of Afro and the rough and beautiful paint of Burri,
Marca-Relli went beyond painting, in a puzzle of matter. In the early 1950’s he came back to
New York and built an intense relationship with William de Kooning and Jackson Pollock,
working together at the big ideals of a new American art, together with Philip Guston, Mark
Rothko, Robert Motherwell and many others.
In 1951, together with Leo Castelli, they organised the “Ninth Street Show”, the first
collective show of the so-called American abstract expressionist movement. Two years later,
in 1953, he exhibited his first collages at the Stable Gallery, during the second collective
show of this new school of New York. Soon after he won the Logan Medal of the Art
Institute in Chicago, and thanks to his retrospective at the Whitney Museum in NY in 1967,
his name was one of the most important of this new American movement.