LAWRENCE CARROLL

The painter, sculptor, cosmopolite and great friend of the gallery, Lawrence Carroll, passed away unexpectedly on 21 May 2019.

To mark this sad occasion, the Buchmann Galerie has curated a show of materialised memories of the artist’s career from the archive, including catalogues, Carroll’s newspapers, created by him for important exhibitions, and a selection from his last cycle of works. Also included in the exhibition is the the documentary: Lawrence Carroll, Finding a Place, written and directed by Simona Ostinelli, courtesy Pic-Film SA and RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera.

The concept of time has played a prominent role in the eclectic body of work Lawrence Carroll leaves behind. Many of the artist’s paintings and sculptures came into being over long periods of time, often produced by the artist in different studios between Malibu, Marquette, Venice, Bolsena and, recently, in Tivoli, New York. Carroll’s poetic works are determined by a respect for ‘the instant in time’; developed for the sake of the moment, the artist allowed himself to be guided by time–the duration of time–where nothing occurs abruptly. This is what the artist meant by the title of his recent monographic exhibition As the Noise Falls Away (Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in Magdeburg, Germany, 2018).

Lawrence Carroll acted out of observing the inconspicuous. His art comes out of a sequence of highly sensitive processes, in which one’s own perception, the creative hand, materials selected and the place of presentation are all brought into harmony and tied aesthetically. In this process, the personal search for traces segues into leaving his own marks, which are to be understood as a condensation of his thoughts and formative acts.

The object-like character of his paintings–the consequence of keeping his painting distant from all illusionism–only strengthened his resolve to take account of the works’ importance in space. Carroll’s art inserts itself into those relations to create constellations–like measure and space, light and shadow, colour and object, or like the emptiness left behind by the past in relation to the present.

The first exhibition of Lawrence Carroll’s work in the Buchmann Galerie was conceived for the gallery in Basel in 1994, followed by numerous exhibitions in Cologne, Berlin, Agra and Lugano. Carroll presented his first ‘Yellow Paintings’, ‘Grey Paintings’, the first site-specific ‘Dust Paintings’, ‘Freezing Paintings’, and the ‘Sleeping Painting’–installed in the canal waters of St. Alban Pond–and which was washed away by the tide one morning into the Rhine.

With these wonderful memories, we now mourn the loss of a great artist and a true friend whom we will miss very much. Since 1994, the Buchmann Galerie Berlin/Lugano has presented Lawrence Carroll’s work in twelve solo exhibitions.