Untitled 1960

This untitled artwork by Conrad Marca-Relli is composed of canvas, stripes, and muted colors all cobbled together. I’m imagining Marca-Relli finding these fragments of striped and plain fabric, and collaging them together on a board with glue or maybe even stitching them. I wonder what it was like for Marca-Relli to work with collage. He’s fitting together shapes like a puzzle. I see here the kind of trial-and-error, the material sensibility, that I recognize from my own process of painting. The beige and white abstract shapes and stripes create a tension here, and for me, an openness. This work reminds me of other collage artists like Hannah Hoch, but also painters like Robert Motherwell who were working around the same time. I believe artists are in ongoing conversation with one another, and this piece embodies that. It's a conversation that keeps going—that you are now a part of.