Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli was an American artist specialising in collage. He raised the art of collage to new levels and was the first to use canvas collage.

The leading collage artist of his generation

Conrad Marca-Relli (1913–2000) was an American artist best known for his pioneering use of collage within Abstract Expressionism. Born Corrado di Marcarelli in Boston to Italian immigrant parents, he moved to New York as a child and later studied at the Cooper Union. Initially associated with the post-war New York School, Marca-Relli played a significant role in the development of abstract collage as a major form of artistic expression.

Untitled No.2. Oil on Canvas Collage

Conrad Marca Relli

Summer Noon, oil, canvas collage and burlap on canvas, 1968

Conrad Marca Relli

Oil cloth, tinted canvas, enamel paint, and oil on canvas from 1956

Conrad Marca Relli

By the early 1950s Marca-Relli developed a technique of abstract collage, attaching biomorphically-shaped pieces of painted or dyed canvas to the surfaces of his pictures. While his fellow Abstract Expressionists in the Club on Eighth Street generally avoided representative subject matter in their work, Marca-Relli often evoked the tradition of Renaissance painting. In this work, he paraphrases the fifteenth-century painter Paolo Uccello's famous scenes commemorating Florence's victory over Siena in the Battle of San Romano in 1432, deliberately using a canvas of the same dimensions as those of the three Renaissance panels now found in the Louvre, the Uffizi, and the National Gallery, London

Conrad Marca Relli

Early years

Conrad Marca Relli

Collage

Though he began as a painter, Marca-Relli transitioned to collage in the early 1950s, a shift that defined his mature style. He used large, irregularly cut pieces of painted canvas, often layering them in a complex, puzzle-like manner to create bold, architectonic compositions. His collages maintained the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism but introduced a sculptural, almost relief-like physicality. He often worked in a limited color palette, favoring earth tones, blacks, and whites, which emphasized form, texture, and spatial relationships rather than color dynamics

Conrad Marca Relli

Pushing collage beyond its traditional role

Marca-Relli’s collage process involved a meticulous construction of overlapping fragments, which he sometimes reworked by adding and subtracting pieces until achieving a dynamic balance. His works evoke a sense of fragmentation and reconstruction, reflecting both the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionist painting and a rigorous, structured approach akin to Cubism. Some of his most famous pieces from the 1950s and 1960s are monumental in scale, pushing collage beyond its traditional role as a supplementary technique into a fully autonomous medium

Conrad Marca Relli

Parma

In the late 1950s, he lived and worked in Europe, where he was influenced by classical architecture and Italian frescoes, further refining his use of space and form. He later settled in Parma, Italy, where he continued experimenting with collage until his death in 2000.

Influences

Marca-Relli was greatly influenced in his early career by the dreamlike imagery of the Surrealists. His experiments with collage began as a simple expedient one day in 1953 when he ran out of paint. The technique provided the dense surface texture of impasto while maintaining the compositional clarity impasto often obscured. That same year he met Jackson Pollock and Bill de Kooning, leading painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Influenced by their intuitive method of painting, he began to work improvisationally, cutting and fixing the fragments of canvas spontaneously, scorching the canvas with a torch, and allowing the black fixative to ooze out between contiguous shapes.

Other Collage Artists

Apart from Marca-relli Collage has in the past taken a subsidiary artform in the world of art. No longer. To see other artist who have taken collage to new heights, see below

Other Collage artists

Conrad Marca Relli

Collage

Conrad Marca-Relli was the son of a news commentator and foreign correspondent. Marca-Relli grew up both in Boston and in Europe and took his first art lessons in Italy. Although largely self-taught, he briefly attended the Cooper Union Institute in 1930. The following year, at age 18, he established his own studio in New York City. During the Great Depression, Marca-Relli worked for the WPA Federal Art Project (1935–38), creating paintings and murals, and he later taught at several universities, including Yale and the University of California at Berkeley. In the late 1990s Marca-Relli moved to Italy, where he continued to paint until his death.

Conrad Marca-Relli

The early 1960s

The early 1960s brought a new harmony and calm to Marca-Relli’s works, such as The Blackboard (1961), which is especially notable for its subdued but luminous colours. Seeking a less flexible material than canvas to complement the new formal rigour of his compositions, he experimented with painted vinyl and cut aluminum. He then made the logical step to metal relief and finally to free-standing aluminum sculpture, but he returned in 1966 to painted canvas collages characterized by stark calligraphic designs

The Artist's Club

One of the founders of the Artist’s Club, alongside Franz Kline and John Ferren, Marca-Relli was part of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Focusing on art from the 1930s until his death at the age of 87, he established his own studio in Greenwich Village in 1931

Conrad Marca Relli

Spanning Decades

A central figure in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism that emerged after the Second World War, Marca-Relli’s career spans many decades and two continents. A contemporary of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Marca-Relli’s works are made on the same monumental scale for which the Abstract Expressionist movement is known, yet Marca-Relli’s practice is unique amongst his compatriots for he rejected paint in favour of collage, a medium which Marca-Relli is now synonymous with.

Conrad Marca-Relli

Works to be found

Marca- Relli’s works can be found in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museu d’Art Contemporani MACBA, Barcelona; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Collage instead of paint

Marca-Relli’s practice is unique amongst his compatriots for he rejected paint in favour of collage, a medium which Marca-Relli is now synonymous with.

A

To subscribe to our collage newsletter please complete below:

Composition I

Etching and aquatint on Gvarro paper

Jackson Pollock's neighbour

In 1953, Conrad Marca-Relli, left Manhattan, with all its distractions, for a cottage in Springs, a quiet hamlet in the town of East Hampton. His new home — “in terrible shape,” as he wrote years later — was next to the property of the painters Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner. Given Pollock’s reputation as an alcoholic brawler, Marca-Relli’s friends warned against the move. Yet his four years at 852 Fireplace Road, during which he concentrated on the collages for which he became known, proved to be among the most creative of his career.