Conrad Marca-Relli’s achievement has been to raise collage to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting. Beginning in 1953, he accepted the potential risks inherent in collage and developed it as a complete pictorial system essentially without precedent in modern art. . . . Marc... Read more
Conrad Marca-Relli’s achievement has been to raise collage to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting. Beginning in 1953, he accepted the potential risks inherent in collage and developed it as a complete pictorial system essentially without precedent in modern art. . . . Marca-Relli has extended collage to the point where it now carries its own full and distinct range of formal and emotive means.
– William C. Agee, 1967
Knoedler & Company is pleased to announce our representation of Conrad Marca-Relli (1913–2000) with the gallery’s first exhibition of his work, presented in association with Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma. The exhibition comprises twenty-two works, created in New York between 1945 and 1967.
Knoedler’s exhibition focuses on Marca-Relli’s developments, during his New York period, in the medium of collage. In his essay for the catalogue, “Patchwork Paper Doll: The Early Work and Career of Conrad Marca-Relli,” Jasper Sharp writes: Right from the outset Marca-Relli was drawn to the freedom, immediacy and room for accident that the medium afforded him. And he goes on to quote the artist, from an unpublished 1965 interview:
If one is receptive to it, the material should influence you in some way. In other words, the limitations of the material acted two ways: it confronted me with a problem of solving the shape and reducing it to the simple form that I was looking for. On the other hand, a collage has always been to me a kind of discipline. It’s a way in which I can work so as to do the same thing over and over again and keep the freshness of the canvas. . . . You can just keep on gluing and gluing a hundred times until you get the shape you want, the relationship you want, you can lock up forms the way you want.
This exhibition spans the dense early period of Marca-Relli’s career that includes his first solo New York exhibition (in 1947); his participation in the 9th Street show, which he helped to organize (in 1951); and his years of involvement with the Artists’ Club, of which he was a founding member. It includes the year of his participation in the groundbreaking exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, at The Museum of Modern Art (1961). And it includes the years he was represented by two of New York’s most forward-looking gallerists: Eleanor Ward and Samuel Kootz. It culminates in 1967, the year of his first museum retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (William C. Agee, curator). Also during the “New York Years,” works by Marca-Relli first entered major American museum collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
