Marco Tirelli (Rome 1956)

Marco Tirelli was born in Rome in 1956. He was a student at the Academy of Toti Scialoja, a master artist to whom he was always tied. In 1978 he held his first personal exhibition in Milan. In 1981, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. His collaboration with gallery owner Fabio Sargentini began three years later and lasted throughout the 1980s. At the same time, he took a studio at the former Cecere pasta factory in Via degli Ausoni, and there, with other young artists (Ceccobelli, Dessì, Gallo, Nunzio, and Pizzi Cannella) a group was formed under the name of the New Roman School, giving each one impetus for highly individual experiences. In the mid-80s he exhibited his works in New York and, from then on, on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan and Australia.
From the start, Tirelli’s painting treated geometry as a god of whom all questions could be asked and from whom all answers could be obtained. This obsession drove him to create geometrical images that were perfect and, at the same time, unreal and into which he poured – guided by the grand masters of concretism of the 1930s (Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Vantongerloo) but also by the teachings of Piero della Francesco and De Chirico –  the constant ambiguity of perception and a vision of the world that was always balanced between weight and the absence of things, between dreams and certainty, shadow and light, and fluctuating between reason and madness.