Lawrence Carroll (1954-2019) was an American contemporary artist renowned for his poetic and contemplative approach to painting and sculpture.
Carroll was born in Melbourne, Australia, the second son of George Carroll and Mary Gaynor. In 1958, the Carrolls decided to emigrate to Santa Monica in California and after two years they moved to Newburry Park in Los Angeles, where Lawrence attended school.
After completing his studies at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, with a diploma in illustration, and at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, he moved to New York City in the early 1980s, immersing himself in the bustling art scene of the time. Working as an illustrator for newspapers like The New York Times and the Village Voice and teaching drawing and illustration at Pratt and the School of visual arts, Carroll had the opportunity to encounter the work of the Minimalists as well as the protagonists of American Abstract Expressionism. In this time, he shaped his artistic research based on introspection and subtle relationship between painting and space, creating a number of small cube-shaped works that blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture. He also created his first painting colored with the “dirty” white, called by the artist “off-white color”, a non-color saturated with memory and layered emotions. He began to develop different kinds of works, like his Cut Paintings, Erasure Paintings, Insert Paintings and works assembled with the help of staples and wax. The use of muted palettes and minimalistic compositions reflect a deep engagement with themes of memory, time, and impermanence.
In 1987 he participated to his first group show in a museum, the Bronx Museum and the Queens Museum in New York, and a year after, he held his first solo show at Stux gallery in Boston and New York.
At the end of the 1980s, Carroll began to develop his Stacked Paintings, that consisted in layers of wood and painted canvases, as well as the Calendar Paintings that also featured stratified canvases.
In 1989, Carroll participated to the Einleuchten group exhibition in the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and held his first European solo show in Frankfurt.
In 1991, the artist had an encounter with Giuseppe and Rosa Giovanna Panza di Biumo. A very important event for the career of the artist, since these collectors acquired a large number of his works and involved Carroll in a series of important exhibitions dedicated to the Panza collection.
In 1992, he is invited to participate in documenta IX, Kassel. A year after, both German art galleries and museums invited Carroll to exhibit his work.
The second part of the 1990s was characterized by his collaborations with Studio Trisorio in Naples and Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano.
In the following years, he created Puzzle Paintings, Shadow Paintings and Table Paintings.
In 2004, Carroll moved to Venice and started to teach painting at IUAV University, where he will work until 2013.
Many major exhibitions took place in during that period, like a retrospective at Villa Panza, Varese, dedicated to Carroll’s 1990-2005 period, exhibitions at Hôtel des Arts in Toulon and at the Museo Correr in Venice and many others, such as the participation in 2013 to Venice Biennale at the Vatican Pavilion.
Lawrence Carroll’s works are featured in several major international private and museum collections, such as Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY), MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Menil Collection (Houston), MART Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Collezione Maramotti, Collezione Panza and many others, reflecting his significant impact on contemporary art.

Lawrence Carroll, 2013. Photo © Lucy Jones Carroll