1976 Conrad Marca-Relli Spanish Art Exhibition Print

1976 Conrad Marca-Relli Spanish Art Exhibition Print. Original art exhibition print promoting an art exhibition of the artists works at Galeria Eude, Barcelona, Spain. Printed by La Poligrafa S.A Barcelona. Size: 16”W x 21.5”H. About the Artist - Conrad Marca-Relli Conrad Marca-Relli was born in Boston on June 5, 1913, to Italian immigrant parents, and spent much of his childhood moving between the United States and Europe as his family traveled, which gave him an early exposure to Italian art and architecture that would echo through his work for decades. He settled in New York as a teenager and was largely self-taught, apart from a brief period of study at Cooper Union. During the Depression he worked for the WPA's Federal Art Project, painting murals and easel pictures, and after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II he returned to New York and fell in with the circle of artists who would become the Abstract Expressionists. His early postwar paintings were quiet, dreamlike architectural scenes influenced by Giorgio de Chirico, but he was soon drawn into the energy of the New York School as a founding member of the Eighth Street Club and one of the organizers of the landmark 1951 Ninth Street Show. In the early 1950s Marca-Relli found the approach that defined his career: large "collage paintings" built from pieces of cut canvas glued onto a canvas ground, then worked over with paint. A stay in Mexico, where he was struck by sun-bleached adobe walls, helped push him toward these flat, interlocking shapes, and the method let him bring the structure of architecture and the human figure into the gestural language of Abstract Expressionism. Around the same time he bought a home in Springs, East Hampton, near friends Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Willem de Kooning, and his reputation rose quickly through the 1950s, with his work entering major museum collections. In the 1960s he experimented with metal and vinyl collages and taught at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, and the Whitney Museum gave him a retrospective in 1967. In his later decades Marca-Relli increasingly left the New York art world behind and returned to Europe, living for long periods on the island of Ibiza before settling in Italy. He kept working and exhibiting there, refining his collage technique into cleaner, more restrained compositions, and he died in Parma on August 29, 2000. Although he has sometimes been overshadowed by his more famous neighbors in the Hamptons, he is now recognized as one of the most original members of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists and a pioneer of collage as a serious, large-scale painting medium.