COLOGNE.- Galerie Karsten Greve announced the death of Lawrence Carroll, who suddenly passed away on Tuesday morning, May 21, 2019, at the age of 64, in Cologne. He leaves behind an intimate and melancholic body of work, a unique testimony a time that was of both creative and deconstructive time. In his paintings, which often morph into objects, humble materials, forgotten fragments and the passing of time always leave their mark on the canvas. They are continuously reinvented, as every brushstroke erases the preceding one. For Lawrence Carroll, creativity lay within a lengthy process of concentration and contemplation: he constructed an intimate connection with his work until it, in effect, slowly revealed itself to him. Since 1999, Galerie Karsten Greve has had the privilege of collaborating with him and promoting his sensitive and subtle oeuvre.
Lawrence Carroll was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1954 and grew up in California. His works have been exhibited in major contemporary art museums and acquired by prestigious public and private international collections. These include the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the MOCA in Los Angeles in the U.S., the MART - Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Trento and Rovereto, The Vatican Museums in Italy, the Stuttgart City Gallery in Germany, and the Museo Cantonale d'Arte in Lugano, Switzerland. In 2018 an important monographic exhibition was shown at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg, and Fondazione Rolla in Bruzella, Switzerland, is currently presenting its photographic production. Moments, his last solo exhibition, opened Friday, May 24, 2019.
On display are works from the past five years, including never-before exhibited objects from the artist’s studio.
Lawrence Carroll characterizes himself as a painter who carries a thousand painters in himself, regarding his entire œuvre as a painting. The majority of the works, which he calls ‘paintings’, however, look like wall objects. They are painting and sculpture at the same time, their plasticity goes beyond the traditional concept of a picture. His works reveal themselves as ‘painterly construction’ in whose structure or surface the artist incorporates objects or materials and thus destroys them, before reassembling them or ‘repairing’ them, as he himself says. Using simple materials such as dust, the quest for reduction and the installation of artworks in space, Lawrence Carroll is close to the aesthetics of Arte Povera. The use of traditional technical means such as oil paint and raw materials such as wood, wax and canvas corresponds to the colourfulness of his work. On closer inspection, they reveal an infinitely subtle nuance in off-white, beige, hazy yellow, atmospheric blue-green, and black.
The Cologne exhibition bears the title Moments and seeks to make beholders aware that Lawrence Carroll understands his works and groups of works as an expression of a decisive moment, which he has tried to capture: ‘I have been interested in the impossibility of holding a moment, for a long time. I know in this search I am not alone. The simple things that interest me are almost always out of my reach. What starts out simple is revealed over time to be extraordinarily complex. An infinite labyrinth.”
Lawrence Carroll makes it clear that he only develops his works during the work process itself: ‘Painting has these unpredictable moments and that is what they must stay for me, unpredictable. There can be routine in many ways in my life and studio but not when I paint.’ Through his poetic expression, based on human experience, he transforms the simplest materials into effective metaphors of transience.
