Exhibition Details

Cardi Gallery is proud to present the first major solo show in the UK of Italian contemporary artist, Marco Tirelli (b. 1956, Rome). Featuring over 150 works in an allegorical journey developed over four stories of Cardi Gallery’s London space, this exceptional museum-scale retrospective includes drawings, paintings, photographs, and small sculptures, many of which produced for the exhibition.
A member of the New Roman School in the 1980s and 1990s, Tirelli was 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 has deeply informed his highly personal and allegorical vocabulary of memories. His works populate a complex visual archive, one that the artist has been systematically building over time since his early childhood. They 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 the 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.