The Inquisitor
Conrad Marca-Relli
CONRAD MARCA-RELLI, 1954. COLLAGED CANVAS AND VINYL, EPOXY, AND OIL ON CANVAS.
As a founding member of the first generation of the New York School, Marca-Relli counted amongst his friends and contemporaries De Kooning, Pollock, Kline, and Motherwell. Together, this group laid the foundations of Abstract Expressionism, moving art away from representation and context, and bringing it deep into the interior of themselves. Yet Marca-Relli, deeply knowledgable in art history and infatuated with the renaissance, could not fully abandon the traditions that inspired him. By the start of the 1950s, he had found a middle ground that married the Italian romance of his heart and heritage with the American, abstract workings of his mind. He created muted collages of canvas sheets, cut in anthropomorphic shapes and dyed in simple, sombre, earthly hues. The work’s exist in perfect contradiction - they paraphrase scenes of glorious, figurative depiction and turn them into abstract renderings, viewable both as pieces of aesthetic abstraction and direct expressions of people and place. Marca-Relli would not go on to achieve the fame of his comrades, but his bridge between Renaissance tradition and contemporary avant-garde continues to inform artists across the world.