Born in Boston to Italian parents, Corrado Marcarelli – known from 1950 as Conrad Marca-Relli – moved with his family to New York City in 1927. He attended a private art school and evening painting classes, developing an interest in Italian Renaissance art. In 1930, he took Faust Azzaretti’s classes at the Cooper Union Institute. After the 1929 crisis, he worked for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, between 1935 and 1938. During this period, he met artists who disrupted his vision of painting such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and John Graham.
Between 1941 and 1945, Marca-Relli enlisted in the U.S. Army, and exhibited for the first time in the exhibition Soldier Artists (1941) with a work entitled Reveille. After completing his military service, he moved to Birdcliff, Woodstock, where he created paintings influenced by Surrealism and the metaphysical painting of De Chirico, Carrà and Sironi. After an extensive journey between Paris and Rome in 1947-1948, Marca-Relli along with Philip Pavia, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and numerous other artists established the Eight Street Club. The club was an important reference for American intellectuals, as well as an entity that championed the self-organized group exhibition in 1951 known as the Ninth Street Show. This expansive exhibition showcased Abstract Expressionism and was supported by Leo Castelli. The exhibition firmly establishes Marca-Relli within the ranks of the New York School artists, and his name is prominently in all of the group’s Painting and Sculpture Yearbooks from 1953 to 1957. In 1953, Marca-Relli participated in a second edition of the Ninth Street Show, held at the Stable Gallery, where he unveiled his inaugural collages. Following the second Ninth Street Show, several museums such as MoMA, the Solomon Guggenheim, and the Withney Museum purchased and added large-scale works to their collections. That same year, Marca-Relli he moved to East Hampton, Long Island, where he became close friends with Jackson Pollock.
Between the 1950s and 1960s, the artist gained increasing recognition: he won the  Logan Medal of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954; participated in the XXVIII Venice Biennale in 1955 and Documenta II in Kassel in 1959; exhibited with Robert Motherwell in Düsseldorf in 1961; the following year, he participated in the major traveling exhibition on Abstract Expressionism in Darmstadt, Abstrakte Americanische. In 1967 the Whitney Museum of American Art devoted a first retrospective to him.
As previously mentioned, Marca-Relli’s early works, as well as those presented thus far, enter into a dialogue that encompasses their thematic exploration of the urban landscape, still life, circus motifs, and architectural elements, as well as their atmospheric compositions. These works draw inspiration from De Chirico’s Metaphysical art and the avant-garde movements exemplified by Picasso’s Cubism and the Surrealist tendencies of European emigrants. In 1956, Marca-Relli produced The Death of Jackson Pollock, a piece dedicated to the tragic death of his friend in a car accident. That same year, the Metropolitan Museum acquired The Battle, a work inspired by Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1438).
The artist embarked on another journey to Rome in 1957, where he forged connections with Ettore Colla, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and Toti Scialoja. He served as a teacher at Yale University from 1954 to 1955, and again from 1959 to 1960. In 1958, he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1966, at New College, Sarasota. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the artist divided his time between Italy, New York, and various European capitals – and he also lived aboard a boat on the Seine and in the Balearic Islands. In 1997 he moved to Parma, as a consequence of a long collaboration that began in 1989 with Galleria d’Arte Niccoli. The following year he held an exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, entitled Tribute to Brand-Relli. Two years later he died in Parma, after receiving honorary citizenship. That same year, the Mathildenhöhe Institute in Darmstadt dedicated a major retrospective to him. In 2008, a new retrospective was organized at the Rotonda spaces in Milan. Between 2009 and 2011, two major exhibitions were presented by Knoedler&Company Gallery in New York, The New York Years 1945-1967 and City to Town. The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton tributes him with an exhibition titled The Springs Years 1953-1956. The last Italian exhibition was organized by the Galleria Mattia De Luca: Conrad Marca-Relli | The Irascible Master (2021).