Art Knowledge News
Knoedler & Company Presents Conrad Marca-Relli / The New York Years |
 |
 |
| Written by Jasper Sharp |
| Tuesday, 03 November 2009 02:08 |
|
If one is receptive to it, the material should influence you in some way. In other words, the limitations of the material acted two ways: it confronted me with a problem of solving the shape and reducing it to the simple form that I was looking for. On the other hand, a collage has always been to me a kind of discipline. It’s a way in which I can work so as to do the same thing over and over again and keep the freshness of the canvas. . . . You can just keep on gluing and gluing a hundred times until you get the shape you want, the relationship you want, you can lock up forms the way you want.  This
exhibition spans the dense early period of Marca-Relli’s career that includes
his first solo New York exhibition (in 1947); his participation in the 9th
Street show, which he helped to organize (in 1951); and his years of involvement
with the Artists’ Club, of which he was a founding member. It includes the year
of his participation in the groundbreaking exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, at
The Museum of Modern Art (1961). And it includes the years he was represented by
two of New York’s most forward-looking gallerists: Eleanor Ward and Samuel
Kootz. It culminates in 1967, the year of his first museum retrospective, at the
Whitney Museum of American Art (William C. Agee, curator). Also during the “New
York Years,” works by Marca-Relli first entered major American museum
collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art,
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of
Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue (64 pages; 23 color plates; 6 black and white photographs), with an essay by Jasper Sharp. Knoedler is open Tuesday to Friday, 9:30 am to 5:30 pm and Saturday 10 am to 5:30 pm. On view through 28 November, 2009. About the author: Jasper Sharp is a writer and curator of modern and contemporary art. Born in London in 1975 and educated as an art historian in Great Britain, he worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, from 1999 to 2005. There he was responsible for exhibitions, collection installations and contemporary projects including the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He contributed essays to catalogues and museum publications on William Baziotes, Gino Severini, Alberto Giacometti and Max Ernst, and a chapter to the catalogue raisonné of Art of This Century, the museum-gallery designed by Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler for Peggy Guggenheim in 1942. In 2006 he was appointed Curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, a role which allowed him to work more directly with artists on a range of international projects and participate in the development of one of Austria's most respected private collections. More recently, he has been engaged in a series of curatorial, lecture, and writing projects, the primary focus of which is the history and theory of collecting. He recently edited a monograph for JRP|Ringier on the artist Arcangelo Sassolino, wrote catalogue essays for the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the Secession, Vienna, and curated the exhibition John Gerrard Animated Scene at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Visit : http://knoedlergallery.com/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
Related Articles :
