Conrad Marca-Relli and Robert Nickel Exhibition

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

[Image: Conrad Marca-Relli "Untitled (F98)" (c. 1960) oil and collage on paper, 19 3/4 x 25 3/4 in.]

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Pavel Zoubok Gallery presents an intimate exhibition of works by Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000) and Robert Nickle (1919-1980), two American artists whose respective collage-based practices, both incorporating subtly hued and tactile materials, come directly out of the tradition of postwar American abstraction.

As a first-generation abstract expressionist and member of the New York School, Marca-Relli was able to translate the same principles of scale, gesture and speed into his collages. Working strictly as a painter until 1953, Marca-Relli on a trip to Mexico ran out of paint and began to cut canvas and raw linen into strips to incorporate into his paintings—a decision that would shape the rest of his career. In the 1967 exhibition catalogue from University of California at Berkeley Art Museum, Nora Selz comments that this shift allowed him to “achieve the illusion of limited and controlled depth without sacrificing unity between the background and foreground of the canvas—thereby resolving a problem which had concerned him for several years.” He further developed this idea in the 1960s when he began to incorporate grommets, vinyl and other more industrial materials into his work, which we can see in his 1965 work Untitled #3.

Conrad Marca-Relli was born in Boston to immigrant parents and moved to New York City at age thirteen where in 1930 he briefly attended Cooper Union. He taught at Yale University from 1954-1955 and from 1959-1960, and later at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1967, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective and later he was the subject of retrospectives at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice (1999) and the Institut Mathildenhdhe in Darmstadt, Germany (2000). Conrad Marc-Relli’s work is in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

A distinguished postwar collagist and beloved figure in the artistic landscape of Chicago, Robert Nickle’s abstract compositions, constructed solely from the flotsam he found on the street, were both deliberate and subtle. The power of these collages comes from his use of unaltered found objects, leaving each scrap exactly as he found it and denying the impulse to cut or alter them. In contrast to the spontaneity of Marca-Relli’s process, Nickle would often work on a particular collage for years, sometimes over 30 years before he found the right element to complete it. His compositions employ a similarly subdued palette but “speak” a decidedly geometric language.

Originally from Michigan, Robert Nickle came to Chicago in 1946 to study with Lazlo Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design where he was instantly attracted to Bauhaus principles of design. He would later teach there from 1949 to 1952 then at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, who after his passing organized a retrospective of his work. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Roosevelt University, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Robert Nickle’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, David and Alfred Smart Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Indianapolis Museum, Smithsonian Museum, Carnegie Institute Museum and the National Gallery in Washington.