MARCO TIRELLI

Early Life and Education

Marco Tirelli was born in Rome into an artistic environment. His father worked as the manager of the Swiss Institute in Rome and young Tirelli spent much of his childhood drawing in the midst of visiting scholars and artists. At age 15, he was given a studio space for his advanced talents as a draughtsman.

Tirelli studied set design at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome, developing interests in the role of design in representing ideas in their most distilled form. In Tirelli’s work, the influence of Swiss theatrical designer Adolphe Appia is visible in his use of geometric forms and dramatic lighting.

In the 1980s and 1990s, living and working alongside a diverse group of artists in the former Cerere pasta factory in San Lorenzo, Rome, Tirelli became known as a member of the New Roman School.

Reality and Illusion

Marco Tirelli’s practice is informed both by his background and the layered histories of his environment. He is particularly occupied with the relationship between reality and illusion, including the tension between the surface appearance of objects and their vast web of collective memories and cultural values.

Marco Tirelli’s artworks range across drawing, sculpture, and painting. Drawing is significant to his practice, both as preparatory studies and as final works in and of themselves. As the starting point for his artworks, Tirelli draws from a broad array of subject matter: geometric shapes, natural elements, manmade machines, architectural forms, and everyday objects. His works often employ dramatic contrasts of light and dark, hazy sfumato, and illusionistic effects.

Tirelli is particularly influenced by his time in the Italian city of Spoleto, where he experienced the intense darkness of the mountainous region far away from the bright lights of the country’s urban centres. Works such as Untitled (2012) often seem to depict luminous objects emerging from complete darkness. In this monochrome work, a square of intense light appears within a darkened recess. Through their subdued, dream-like treatment, Tirelli’s work suggests not the realistic qualities of the objects themselves, but the imaginary worlds attached to them.

For the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, Tirelli displayed a room with a diverse selection of small, diagrammatic images and sculptural reliefs covering its walls. Drawing imagery from a personal iconography that Tirelli has been developing since childhood, the work alludes to the late-Renaissance notion of the studiolo, a room of interesting objects that served as a place of study and contemplation. Presented as an encyclopaedic archive, the installation emphasises the possibility of their relationship through chains of symbolic associations, rather than their objective function.

Exhibitions and Institutional Holdings

Marco Tirelli has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including a significant duo exhibition with Sol LeWitt at the American Academy in Rome in 1990. His work has also featured in the Venice Biennale, the São Paolo Biennial, and the Rome Quadriennale.

Tirelli’s work can be found in museums across the world, including the National Museum of 21st Century Art (MAXXI), Rome; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO); the European Parliament Art Collection, Brussels; the Fortuny Museum, Venice; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig), Vienna; and the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan.

Website

Marco Tirelli’s website can be found here.

Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2021