Né à Rome, Marco Tirelli vit et travaille dans sa ville natale.
One of the leading figures of contemporary Italian art, he has, since the late 1970s, pursued a singular artistic practice that explores the boundaries between painting, perception, and the mind’s experience of space.
Following his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and a degree in scenography, he dedicated himself fully to painting. From his very first exhibitions, his work distinguished itself through a rigorous exploration of light, shadow, and geometry, generating enigmatic forms poised between emergence and dissolution. In Tirelli’s work, the image does not seek to represent reality; rather, it interrogates the very act of perceiving it. Volumes hover in suspension, boundaries fade away, and space assumes a meditative instability, inviting the gaze into a deeply introspective, almost spiritual experience.
In the early 1980s, he moved his studio into the former Pastificio Cerere, in the heart of Rome’s San Lorenzo district, a seminal site in the development of contemporary Italian art. Alongside Ceccobelli, Dessì, Gallo, Nunzio and Pizzi Cannella, he was among the leading figures behind the emergence of the Nuova Scuola Romana, whose development was notably championed by the influential critic Achille Bonito Oliva.
His first participation in the Venice Biennale came in 1982, when he was invited to present a dedicated installation within the landmark ‘Aperto 82’ section. The Biennale marked the beginning of a lasting international career, leading to regular participation in many of the most prestigious exhibitions and biennials of contemporary art worldwide.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his work was shown in major institutions and international biennials, including the PAC in Milan, the Rome Quadriennale, the Sydney Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Kunsthalle Frankfurt.
At the American Academy in Rome, an exhibition brought his drawings into dialogue with Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings, revealing a close intellectual affinity between the two artists. In the same year, he was again invited to the Venice Biennale, where he presented a dedicated room.
L’œuvre de Tirelli évolue progressivement vers une dimension environnementale et immersive.
He realised a site-specific installation for the Fondazione Volume! in Rome, activating painting in a direct relationship with architecture and spatial perception.
A major retrospective, Das Universum der Geometrie, was presented at the Institut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt and subsequently travelled to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna.
Notable solo and institutional presentations include the Museo di Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2010), MACRO in Rome (2012), the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome (2013), the Fondazione Pescheria – Centro Arti Visive in Pesaro (2014), and Proportio at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice (2015). In 2013, he was again invited to the Venice Biennale, where he participated in Vice Versa, held within the Italian Pavilion.
His work has been presented in exhibitions in Italy, France, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Antwerp, attesting to the international dimension of his career. Today, his works are included in the collections of leading museums and institutions worldwide.
In paintings of rare, quiet intensity, Marco Tirelli carries forward a radical investigation into the mechanisms of vision, where geometry is transformed into a poetic language and light discloses the invisible.
