Marco Tirelli

1956, Rome, Italy

Marco Tirelli is among the most refined figures in Italian contemporary art, known for his meditative, deeply conceptual painting. Trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, he was one of the leading figures of the Nuova Scuola Romana in the late 1970s. His work is grounded in a rigorous, poetic investigation of light, space and form, expressed in paintings and drawings of powerful atmospheric intensity.

Tirelli builds environments and visions that evoke mental architectures, nameless objects, symbolic geometries. His work has been exhibited in international museums and biennials, including the Venice Biennale and MoMA PS1. Through a masterful use of chiaroscuro and monumental scale, he creates images that do not describe but suggest, drawing the viewer into a space of contemplation and suspension.

Marco Tirelli

Untitled, mixed media on canvas, 2000
203x154 cm

In this Untitled work from 2000, Marco Tirelli approaches form as apparition. A central figure, abstract yet organically curved, emerges from a dark background, in a refined contrast between light and shadow. The golden ochre colour fades toward the edges, hinting at a presence that is at once solid and immaterial, like an architectural body or a volume sculpted by light.
The work offers no narrative clues, but invites contemplation: the pictorial surface becomes mental space, a place where the visible allows the invisible to surface.
The simplicity of the form is only apparent: every curve, every gradation, every edge is conceived as an act of sculptural meditation.
Marco Tirelli offers us a painting that is silence, threshold, question: a suspended space where the gaze meets the enigma of presence.