MIlano. Conrad Marca-Relli. foto

Comune di Milano and Archivio Marca-Relli of Parma are proud of presenting and producing a great retrospective of the American artist during the La Bella Estate di Milano. His paintings and collages, partly unpublished, which document the great importance of this protagonist of the American Abstract Expressionism, will be exhibited in a sequence of about a hundred extraordinary works.

Marca–Relli, who was born in 1913 in Boston from Italian parents and who died in Parma in 2000, was of a member of a famous group of artists, the so called New York School, who renewed the American art, releasing it from the Ecole de Paris influence and starting a dynamic experience of non-figurative painting, between the structural and gesture painting. Its major protagonists were, together with Marca-Relli, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko. Marca-Relli was the promoter of the group and he organized in 1951 the famous Ninth Street Show, the first event to mark the explosion of new talented painters who can be defined as the great masters of the Abstract Formalism before the desecrating period of the Pop Art. Marca-Relli’s work, as the one of the other artists of this innovative and original movement, becomes an expression of an exasperated subjectivism and of the automatic action of the unconscious: the canvas is both means and link between the substance, the colour, the sign and the unconscious of the artist. Marca-Relli, who belongs to the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, appropriates of the immediacy and the impudence of the New York School, and brings back in his art the traditional values of the European picture as elegance and refinement, which were completely refused by the other artists of the same group. The artist has been an independent filter and an active mediator between the European history and the new American vision of painting. The death of Jackson Pollock, dated 1956, is one of his most famous paintings and it was conceived after the identification of the body of his friend Jackson Pollock, who tragically died in a car crash.

In his paintings and in his famous collages (Marca-Relli is well known as the promoter of the collage painting technique), he has abolished the traditional distinction between figurative and abstract, always considering the shape as source of abstract images and working out a complete pictorial system from the collage for the first time in modern art history.

Basic works of the artist can be found at New York MoMA, Metropolitan and Withney, at Bilbao, New York and Venice Guggenheim, at Chicago Art Institute and at Washington National Gallery.

The importance of this great Milan exhibition has helped increasing the interest of critics, museum managers, collectors and dealers for the work of an artist who – due to his shy personality – was generally far from the great kermesse in which the other artists were involved. This show tries to place Marca-Relli back in a primary position in the art history.

On the occasion of this exhibition, a first edition of the catalogue of Marca-Relli’s work has been published by Editore Bruno Alfieri. It contains 100 colour plates, 900 other pictures, essays by English critic David Anfam and by Magdalena Dabrowski of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also the unpublished autobiography of the artist.

To study in detail the artist and his subjects, David Anfam, Bruno Corà and Luigi Sansone will give the conference Conrad Marca-Relli and the American Abstract Expressionism on Monday 22nd September 2008.

The Archivio Marca-Relli, created in 1997 in Parma (as wished by the artist), has the purposed to preserve, promote and spread the knowledge of Marca-Relli’s work.