Marco Tirelli was born in Rome in 1956, but he lives and works in Spoleto.
When he first appeared in the artistic scene, he soon drew people's attention because of his peculiar position between the European abstract culture and the Italian metaphysic tradition. In 1982, Achille Bonito Oliva included him among the artists who were present in the volume Transavanguardia Internazionale. The Ateliers exhibition in 1984 cured by Achille Bonito Oliva in the former bakery Cerere on Via Degli Ausoni in Rome marked the birth of the group called La nuova scuola romana, whose members were Marco Tirelli, Nunzio, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Bruno Ceccobelli and Giuseppe Gallo. Today, the artist presents himself as an architect of imaginary places, a builder of theatres of memory where light and shadow mark the mysterious experience of limits.

Among his most recent exhibitions, it's worth mentioning his participation in La Quadriennale di Roma (Rome Quadrennial) at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 1986. In 1990, he exhibited his own work together with Sol Lewitt at the Accademia Americana in Rome and participated in the Venice Biennial with a solo room. In 1991, he took part in the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil and, for the second time, in La Quadriennale di Roma. In 2002, his one-man show was presented at the Institute Mathildenhöe in Darmstadt and, in 2003, at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna.

Tirelli's relationship with Galleria Fumagalli began in 2001. In 2002, a three-hundred-page monograph was published, with texts by Klaus Wolbert, Peter Weiermaier and Giorgio Verzotti, published on the occasion of the exhibition at the gallery as well as the exhibitions at the Institute Mathildenhöe in Darmstadt and at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna.