CONRAD MARCA-RELLI – From Figure to Abstraction
curated by Mauro Stefanini

More than ten years after the CONRAD MARCA-RELLI - TENSIONI COMPOSTE exhibition, Galleria Open Art of Prato, in collaboration with the Archivio Marca-Relli and the Galleria d’Arte Niccoli of Parma, presents a retrospective dedicated to the great American artist, leading exponent and animator of the New York School.
The exhibition investigates Marca-Relli’s oeuvre from the 1940s until halfway through the 1980s in more than forty works: from his beginnings, linked to a figurative approach to imagery, to collage, a technique he revisited, often on a monumental scale and with results acknowledged to be profoundly original, and to his research into abstractionism as the outcome of pictorial synthesis.

Marca-Relli played a central role in a system of relationships and contrasts that ran through the art of the second half of the 20th century in Europe and America: this exhibition will present a selection of works which, together, sketch a broad historical perspective on the artist and his times, his relationship to classicism and the centrality of the figure in his art.

On occasion of the exhibition, Carlo Cambi Editore will be publishing a bilingual catalogue with critical texts by Marco Scotti.