Exhibition extended until 25 May 2018
De Primi Fine Art in Lugano is pleased to announce its new exhibition Conrad Marca-Relli, the prodigy of collage, in collaboration with
In 1948 Conrad Marca-Relli (Boston 1913 – Parma 2000) arrived in Rome where he met Alberto Burri and Afro Basaldella. The three immediately held an intense communion. Immersed between the lyrical Afro’s chromaticism, and the rough, beautiful backgrounds of Burri, Marca-Relli found those ideas and confirmations that his making art had already outlined.
While Afro remained faithful to a lyric painting, on the contrary, Burri and Marca-Relli got beyond the pictorial representation, in a game of new material inlays, tapestries of varied backgrounds and beautiful scars. Where the colour is made jute, the fabric becomes form, a piece of paper a happy oasis and a calibrated metal box (wisely repeated and modulated), will be both rhythm and structure, form and colour.
Marca-Relli, composing his vast canvases, has embraced a meditation, a calm and an order always carefully studied. To the rapidity and the fury characterizing the contemporary American society, the artist has always preferred a European reflection, a Mediterranean calm, a southern slowness, soon realized in his deep love for his origins: the great painting of the Italian Renaissance. In the invention of an unparalleled collage reality, a technique marked by the elegant precedents of Picasso and Matisse, Marca-Relli moves in a rich, dense and monumental dimension, extending far beyond the paper, and using other materials such as fabric, jute, plastic and metal. Conrad Marca-Relli, as a noble tailor of the form, has been able to dress his paintings with the most meditated and wise inlays.