Conrad Marca-Relli (Bilingual edition)

A friend of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Afro, Alberto Burri and Giuseppe Capogrossi, founder of the Eight Street Club and promoter of the ‘Ninth Street Show’, one of the most important exhibitions of New York art in the 1950s, but above all an artist who worked in both Europe and America, Conrad Marca-Relli (Boston, 1913 – Parma, 2000) was a pivotal figure in American Abstract Expressionism.

Published in collaboration with the Archivio Marca-Relli, based at the Niccoli gallery in Parma, the monograph looks back at the milestones in the Italian-American artist’s career, documenting the strong impact of Marca-Relli and his work on the American and international scene.

In the years immediately after the Second World War, Conrad Marca-Relli (Boston, 1913 – Parma, 2000) was, in fact, one of the protagonists of the New York art scene, first joining the Downton Group and then founding the Eight Street Club in 1949 with Mark Rothko, Fran Kline and William de Kooning. A friend of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, a lecturer at Yale and Berkeley, the Whitney Museum dedicated a solo exhibition him in 1967. A tireless traveller between the United States and Europe, in 1997 he moved to Parma, a city chosen because of his collaboration with the Galleria d’Arte Niccoli, with which he founded the Archivio Marca-Relli in the same year. Since then, the archive has contributed to all the exhibitions dedicated to the artist, including the major retrospective held in the Rotonda on Via Besana in Milan in 2008. Works by Marca-Relli feature in numerous collections, including the Guggenheim in Bilbao; The Art Institute, MET, MoMA and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fondazione Peggy Guggenheim in Venice and the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.

Author Biography

David Anfam is a writer, curator and leading authority on modern American art. He is the Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver and the Director of its Research Center.

Massimo Belli is an Italian art critic.