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Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
CONRAD MARCA-RELLI Untitled.
Multiple with cut, color paper and linen, 1970. 630x480 mm; 25x18 3/4 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 38/50 in pencil, lower margin.
Marca-Relli (1913-2000), a member of the New York School's first generation, was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. He is celebrated for his large-scale collages, composed of pieces of canvas or natural linen overpainted with gestural brushstrokes. In 1967, William Agee, then curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, praised Marca-Relli's work, claiming that his "achievement has been to raise collage to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting," (Agee, Marca-Relli, New York, 1967). During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Marca-Relli was actively involved in the avant-garde art world in New York's Greenwich Village. He helped to found the "Eighth Street Club," an artists' group whose members included William de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov, and he assisted the art dealer Leo Castelli in the organization of the first "Ninth Street Show," considered the first comprehensive display of Abstract Expressionist work. In 1953, he purchased a house near Jackson Pollock's home in Springs, East Hampton, an area that was developing into an artists' colony. Three years later, Marca-Relli identified Pollock's body for the police after his fatal car accident. While Marca-Relli's career blossomed in the 1950s and 1960s, his works were acquired by museums such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all located in New York.
