Marco Tirelli

Italian artist Marco Tirelli’s works populate a complex visual archive, that has systematically been built over time since his early childhood. His drawings, paintings and photographs activate mental realms of cultural recollection, collective memory, and conventional conceptions of value representation through the webs of associations and connotations they are capable of unleashing.

Geometric shapes, elements from tha natural world, manmade tools and pieces of machinery, architectural forms, objects from the everyday world, all meet in his compositions characterised by a strong tension between illusion and reality, between light and darkness.

Tirelli was actually trained in set design. The artist’s background, paired with the visual complexity of the layered histories surrounding him in his hometowns of Rome and Spoleto have deeply informed his highly personal and allegorical vocabulary of memories.

He began to exhibit in the 1970s, when together with the artists of the so-called New Roman School he moved to the spaces of the former “Pastificio Cerere” in San Lorenzo. In 1982, he participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time as part of Achille Bonito Oliva’s and Harald Szeemann’s “Aperto 82” section. He would later exhibit at the Biennale a second time in 1990 and a third in 2013 as part of the Italian Pavilion where he presented his large scale installation of the “Studiolo”.

Tirelli’s works are part of the collections of some of the most important national and international museums and institutions: MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; La Galleria Nazionale, Rome; MARCO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; The Albertina Museum, Vienna; Mumok, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. He is represented by Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium.