" As the noise falls away "

Lawrence Carroll

“as the noise falls away”

Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg

Lawrence Carroll There are only few artists and even less painters who act out of observing the inconspicuous as the painter Lawrence Carroll does. His art comes of a sequence of highly sensitive processes, in which one’s own perception, the creating hand, the selected material and the place for the presentation are brought into harmony and tied aesthetically.

In this process the personal search for traces segues into leaving his own marks that are to be understood as a condensation of his thoughts and formative acts.

Lawrence Carroll (born 1954 in Melbourne, lives in US and Italy) leaves the loud noises or fast conciseness to other artists and sets his precision of silence against it. In this atmosphere of soft tones, it emerges a highly multifaceted tempered and certainly also playful and venturesome work.

In the rooms of the art museum these characteristics find their architectural equivalent. The object-like character of his paintings, which results from the consequence of keeping his painting away from all illusionism, has strengthened him to take into account their importance in space. His art inserts itself into those relations and creates constellations like measure and space, light and shadow, color and object or like the emptiness that the past leaves behind as well as the present. In the exhibition those constellations are components, which are intensified by the location and its unique architecture.

The exhibition visualizes essential lines of this work during the last years. As an installation exhibition it allows a broad perspective onto the work of this worldwide recognized painter. His works are exhibited in several international public collections including the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Documenta IX, 1992, the Guggenheim Museum New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Venice Biennal 2013).

Uwe Gellner

Magdeburg paintings

Let’s open up Lawrence Carroll’s paintings and see what we find …

Terry R. Myers In 1988, when I wrote “Lawrence Carroll’s Boxes,” my first text about his work (and my first published text period), I didn’t know that two years prior he had produced a work using cardboard as its primary material.1 It was made in the Broadway studio in New York that I did visit, but by the time I got there, had I known about this particular painting, I would have guessed that he had moved on. Judging from the image of it that he just sent to me, it looks very much like a faithful yet not derivative homage to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Cardboard” series from 1971-72. Those works of Rauschenberg’s remind us just how much he prefigured the “do-it-yourself” approach that would be extended (especially) in the 1990s. Just take a cardboard box, flatten it, hang it on the wall and you have an instant painting/ drawing/sculpture hybrid work of art.

(It helped that he was Rauschenberg.)

Carroll’s 1986 work does pretty much this, with the added (devotional?) touch of one section painted with house paint on which newspaper images were transferred, as well as a deliberate and associative installation that enables the bottom of the work to rest on the floor.

It’s a door, and an unapologetic one at that.

During that life-changing visit to Carroll’s Broadway studio nearly thirty years ago, I noted that he was making his “box” paintings of canvas, wood, oil paint, and wax (and staples, and often other materials) in a space that was itself a box. To describe this studio as self-contained is an understatement, but it was anything but closed off; my memories are of the expansiveness and generosity of the work anchored by a deep respect for, and understanding of, history. Over the years, I have had so many productive experiences with the breath and the focus of Carroll’s vision, his willingness to literally dismantle and reassemble any and all aspects of his signature way of working. As time passes, I have become more and more convinced that the adventurousness of this would have led to repeated collapses if not for his anchoring in the fundamentals of drawing, whether those that sustain observational representational rendering or improvisational gestural mark-making.

I’ve been privileged to see the inside of several of Carroll’s paintings—although certain types very emphatically don’t have one, for example his two-sided “panel paintings” that sit perpendicular to the wall, or his “folded paintings” that technically do have fronts

and backs yet make those distinctions fluid. Even though there are substantial clues on their front (as well as top, bottom and side) surfaces that indicate the somehow casual yet deeply focused approach to their construction (resulting in their jerry-rigged “make-it-workness”), the insides provide secrets worthy of an archeological dig: not only morsels like fragments of hand-written notes to himself or others, but also direct physical evidence of the chronology of the decision making and risk taking of his building (I suppose it’s actually carpentry, but that is a woefully insufficient label.) The fact that none is this is visible when the work is installed doesn’t diminish in the least the embodiment of its structure in the parts of the painting turned out to us and the world.

This is why I was so turned on by Carroll’s box paintings soon after my arrival in New York all those years ago: they are full of things we don’t see but we know that they’re there. I would say that I feel like I can see them.

Now, today, these cardboard works that Carroll is making (testing?, questioning?) deliver me to several times and places all at once. But, first things first, they are resolutely all about drawing, as he wrote to me: “through the gesture the painting is eventually found.”2 Drawing has always been the foundation of Carroll’s process, and the exposed nature of these cardboard works proclaim it like never before. His “table paintings” did it as well with his approach to drawing in in-the-round space that I found surprising when I first saw them, but these new works are models of careful yet expressive excavation. They are wonderfully strange things on the wall that look at first glance like an operation interrupted (but we know the body of painting can take it) if not a crime scene. But, because they are works by Carroll, that is not a lasting impression.

Carroll and I share a devotion to many of the same artists, but it’s de Kooning who is likely on top. (I suppose because he’s always at the top of my list.) Here I must turn to the words of John Elderfield, from the catalogue for his watershed 2011 MoMA retrospective: writing about de Kooning’s refusals to stick to boundaries (abstract/figurative, color/line, painting/drawing/sculpture, and, I would add, even good/bad) and how these things “inhabit” each other in the master’s work, he goes on to suggest something that I think is very powerful for Carroll’s process as well: “If place building was consonant with space building, then shape building produced the inhabitants.”3 Place, space, and shape: these new works of Carroll’s take deep excavated space and expose it, re-arrange it, make it associative (circulatory systems, even networks, not to mention the structure of the cellulose material used to make them— it’s the stuff that enables trees to stand

untitled 1986 cardboard; house paint; newsprint transfer , wax 503 Broadway studio NYC © Carroll Studio

503 Broadway studio NYC,1988

STUX Gallery,NYC 1990 installation,Page paintings (panel paintings)

Wilhem de Kooning Gotham News 1955

up), make it light and dark, make it painful and redemptive. They bring together more of the things that have made Carroll’s work lasting than I could have ever imagined. In words, they would read as if they would not be able to hold themselves together (a far, far cry from Rauschenberg’s singular “ta-da!” abilities) but in form and being it is their incompleteness, provisionality and takea-chance-ness that makes them whole.

Notes:

1.

Terry R. Myers, “Lawrence Carroll’s Boxes,” Arts Magazine 63 (December 1988): 66-69.

2.

E-mail from the artist, 20 October 2017.

3.

John Elderfield, “Space to Paint,” in de Kooning: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011): 13.

Untitled - Magdeburg painting 2017

Untitled - Magdeburg painting 2017

Untitled - Magdeburg painting 2017

Untitled - Magdeburg painting 2017

Untitled - Magdeburg painting 2018

Wenn der Lärm nachlässt im Kreuzgang Moderates Tosen: Magdeburg zeigt Bilder und Objekte des Amerikaners Lawrence Carroll - eine Kunst, die man nicht beiläufig erfassen kann.

Die Ästhetik des Zerfalls beginnt bereits auf dem Weg zum Atelier in Grotte di Castro im Latium. Steil führt die Straße in Serpentinen durch Felder nach oben, bis die ersten zum Hang hin gebauten alten Häuser wie hängende Kästen an den Felsen erscheinen.

Bereits da stellen sich erste Assoziationen zu den großen, oft monumentalen kastenförmigen “Paintings” von Lawrence Carroll ein, die mitten im Ort in einem aus dem fünfzehnten Jahrhundert stammenden verlassenen Palazzo entstehen. In großer Abgeschiedenheit hinter dicken Mauern und bei vergleichsweise wenig Tageslicht arbeitet der Künstler in geräumigen Sälen mit teilweise hohen Kaminen und Holzbalkendecken mit verblasster Bemalung.

Die gegenwärtige Ausstellung von Lawrence Carroll im Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in Magdeburg rückt die Werke in einen weiteren Bezug. In den hellen ehemaligen Kreuzgängen trifft die Ästhetik des Zerfalls auf das Ideal der monastischen Askese und Armut. Sie öffnet die Augen für ein Werk, das häufig im spannungsvollen Widerspruch zu seiner Umgebung ausgestellt ist und in seiner Bescheidenheit auch nicht selten als Provokation empfunden wird.

Carroll schafft Einzelwerke und Werkgruppen, aber erst ihre Installation oder Inszenierung im Raum bringt sie zur Erscheinung. Der sechzig Werke umfassende Rückblick auf eine rund dreißigjährige Werkentwicklung, die in Kalifornien begann, sich in New York und schließlich Italien fortsetzte, ist mit einer üblichen Retrospektive nicht vergleichbar. Der Ausstellungsbesucher betritt eine vom Künstler bis in jedes Detail festgelegte Inszenierung. Sie sind wie ein Stück von ihm. Entsprechend gibt er ihnen auch einen Titel.

Die Magdeburger Schau heißt “Wenn der Lärm nachlässt” und soll den Besucher in eine Stimmung führen, unter der diese Werke entstanden sind und betrachtet werden wollen. Das Atmosphärische spielt für den Künstler eine entscheidende Rolle. Es geht ihm um ein ganzheitliches Erleben von Kunst. Zur Stille und großen klösterlichen Einfachheit der Architektur passen Carrolls Wand-, Boden- und Hängeobjekte in Off-Weiß, dunstigem Hellgelb und atmosphärischer Bläue - Farben wie von beschädigten alten Fresken im Zustand ihres Verschwindens. Dieses im Material und seiner Gestaltung so bewusst bescheidene Werk hat hier einen idealen Ort gefunden.

Beim Durchwandern der langen Korridore, der ehemaligen Kreuzgänge, fällt als Erstes die großzügige Inszenierung ins Auge, die präzise Plazierung der einzelnen Werke im Raum und die Bedeutung von Licht.

Carroll beschäftigt sich nicht nur im weitgehend monochromen Farbauftrag auf den Oberflächen seiner objekthaften Malerei mit der Darstellung von Licht.

Er leuchtet auch immer wieder einzelne Werke magisch an, sei es auf den Bildoberflächen mit Glühbirnen an langen lose herunterhängenden Kabeln als Teil eines Combine Paintings oder mit separaten Leuchtquellen neben dem Objekt. Das gibt dieser Ausstellung eine geheimnisvolle mystische Stimmung.

Durch den Inszenierungscharakter und die auffallend armen Materialien steht Carrolls karges minimalistisches Werk den Ideen der italienischen Arte povera näher als dem perfektionistischen amerikanischen Minimalismus, der sich der industriellen Fertigung

bedient. Carroll fertigt alles selbst an. Er liebt das scheinbar Unperfekte, seine Materialien tragen Spuren der Zeit, Abnutzungen und Beschädigungen, die er kompositionell einsetzt. Im übertragenen Sinn sind seine in Gestalt objekthaften monochromen Malereien Körper mit Wundmalen.

As the noise in the cloister falls away

Die erste Begegnung mit dem ebenso sperrigen wie hochsensiblen ästhetischen Werk von Lawrence Carroll in Europa verdanken wir Harald Szeemann und Jan Hoet.

Szeemann stellte 1989 den damals in New York lebenden 34-jährigen Künstler in seiner Ausstellung “Einleuchten” in den Hamburger Deichtorhallen vor, Jan Hoet vier Jahre später auf der Documenta 9 in Kassel. Der Dritte im Bunde war Panza di Biumo, Carrolls erster bedeutender Sammler in Europa, der dem damals noch jungen amerikanischen Künstler einen Platz neben einem Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman oder Joseph Beuys gab.

The aesthetics of decay begin even on the way to the studio in Grotte di Castro in Lazio. In hairpin bends the road ascends steeply through fields before the first old houses appear, built into the hillside like hanging boxes on the cliffs. Even at this point we begin to form associations with Lawrence Carroll’s large, indeed often monumental box-like ‘Paintings’, which are created in an abandoned fifteenth-century palazzo in the middle of the village. In great seclusion behind thick walls, and with relatively little daylight, the artist works in spacious halls with, in some cases, high chimneypieces and wooden ceiling beams with faded paint.

In der Ausstellung “Einleuchten” 1989 konnte man das malerische Werk von Carroll bereits in seiner raumgreifenden Eigenschaft als dreidimensionale “Paintings” kennenlernen. Seit seinen Anfängen ging es Carroll nicht nur um die frontale Bildfläche, sondern entscheidend auch um die Bearbeitung der Seiten.

Das führte zu jener Mehransichtigkeit, die vom Betrachter ein Umherwandern im Raum verlangt. In jenen späten achtziger Jahren entstanden auch Carrolls erste im rechten Winkel zur Wand in den Raum ragenden “Page Paintings” und “Small Box Paintings” - beides bis heute fortbestehende Werkbeispiele -, die, wie die Ausstellung in Magdeburg zeigt, in ihrer Weiterentwicklung vom Bildobjekt an der Wand zum freien Objekt im Raum führten.

Raum war fortan der entscheidende Bezugspunkt dieser situativen Kunst, die gleichermaßen das Objekt wie die Malerei im Auge hat. Es ist eine monochrome Malerei mit lichtreflektierenden wächsern glatten Oberflächen, die nach Art des Palimpsests gleichermaßen Verschwinden und Erscheinen in eins setzt.

Prozesshaft ist nicht nur ihre Entstehung, die in vielen Schichten aufgetragene lasierende Farbe, der Wachs und häufig auch Staub beigemischt werden. Prozesshaft ist auch die Wahrnehmung.

Man kann diese Kunst der armen Materialien nicht beiläufig schnell erfassen. Sie verlangt ein Innehalten, Sich-Einlassen auf das Unspektakuläre, Leise, auf die Farbnuancen. Eine entscheidende Rolle spielt dabei immer wieder das Licht, das tief in die lasierenden lichten Farboberflächen eindringt und die darunterliegende Schicht durchscheinen lässt. Je nach Tageszeiten und Lichtverhältnissen verändern die Werke folglich ihre Farbe und ihre Stimmung. Das macht sie lebendig.

Nicht nur im Durchscheinen der Farbschichten, auch in den sichtbar immer wieder neu zusammengesetzten Leinwänden zeigt sich Carrolls prozesshafte Arbeitsweise. Das Werk entsteht nicht nach einem Konzept.

Es entwickelt sich während des Arbeitens und findet so wie zu sich selbst im Ausdruck von Erinnern und Vergänglichkeit.

BARBARA CATOIR Lawrence Carroll - As The Noise Falls Away. Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; bis 18.

März 2018. Ein Katalog ist in Vorbereitung.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Barbara Catoir , December 29, 2017. Page 13 © Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung All rights reserved. Provided Frankfurter Allgemeine Archiv

Moderate uproar: Magdeburg shows pictures and objects by the American artist Lawrence Carroll – artworks that cannot be taken in ‘in passing’.

Lawrence Carroll’s current exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in Magdeburg transports the works into a different frame of reference.

In the bright cloisters of the former priory, the aesthetics of decay collide with the idea of monastic asceticism and poverty. They open our eyes to an œuvre that is frequently exhibited in tension-filled incongruity with its environment and, often enough, seen, by virtue of its modesty, as a provocation.

Carroll creates both individual works and groups of works, but it is only when they are installed or staged in a particular space that their effect is manifested. Comprising sixty items, this look back over a thirty-year development which started in California, before continuing in New York and finally in Italy, cannot be compared to an ordinary retrospective.

The exhibition visitor steps into a mise-en-scène determined by the artist down to the last detail. The works are like a piece of himself. And he gives them a title accordingly.

The Magdeburg show is called ‘As the noise falls away’ and is designed to put visitors into the mood in which the works were created and wish to be viewed. The atmospheric aspect plays a crucial role for the artist. He is concerned with a holistic experience of art. Carroll’s wall, floor and hanging objects in off-white, hazy pale yellow and atmospheric blues – the colours of damaged old frescos in the process of decay – fit in well with the silence and the great monastic simplicity of the architecture.

This œuvre – so deliberately modest in its material and composition – has found an ideal location here.

As we wander through the long corridors, the former cloisters, the first thing that strikes the eye is the generously proportioned staging, the precise placement of the individual works in the room and the importance of light. It is not only in the largely monochrome paint application on the surfaces of his sculptural painting that Carroll concerns himself with the representation of light. Time and again he magically illuminates individual works, be it on the surfaces of the pictures with light-bulbs on long, loosely hanging cables as part of a Combine Painting, or with separate light sources next to the object.

This is what gives this exhibition its mysterious, not to say mystic mood.

By dint of its staged character and the conspicuously ‘poor’ materials used, Carroll’s barren minimalist œuvre has a closer affinity to the ideas of Italian Arte povera than to the perfectionist American Minimalism, which employs industrial production methods. Carroll makes everything himself. He loves the

seemingly imperfect, his materials bear the marks of time. Wear and tear, which he deploys as compositional techniques. In the metaphorical sense, his sculptural monochrome paintings are bodies with wounds, scars, stigmata.

We owed our first European encounters with the work of Lawrence Carroll, a work as bulky as it is sensitive and aesthetic, to Harald Szeemann and Jan Hoet. It was in 1989 that Szeemann exhibited the then 34-year-old, New York-based artist in his show ‘Einleuchten’ in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, while four years later Jan Hoet exhibited his work at documenta IX in Kassel. The third man in this context was Panza di Biumo, Carroll’s first important collector in Europe, who gave the still-young artist a place alongside the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, and Joseph Beuys.

At the 1989 ‘Einleuchten’ exhibition, we already had a chance to discover the three-dimensional quality of Carroll’s painterly work. From the outset, Carroll has been concerned not only with the frontal surface of the picture, but also, and crucially, with the treatment of the lateral surfaces. This spatial characteristic required the beholder to walk around the room in order to take in the multiple views. It was in those late 1980s that Carroll’s ‘Page Paintings’ and ‘Small Box Paintings’ first appeared, extending into the room at right angles to the wall – examples of both are still being created today – which, as the exhibition in Magdeburg shows, led in their subsequent evolution from the pictorial object on the wall to the free-standing object in the room.

The room, or ambient space, was from then on the decisive reference frame for this situational art, which relates to sculpture and painting in equal measure. It is a monochrome form of painting with smooth, waxy, light-reflecting surfaces, which, in the manner of a palimpsest, unite appearance and disappearance in one. It is not only their creation that constitutes a process, a process of applying translucent glazes in many layers, the paint being mixed with wax and frequently with dust as well. The perception is also a process.

It is impossible to take in this art of poor materials quickly in passing. It demands that you pause, and engage with the unspectacular, the quiet, the colour nuances. A crucial role is played time and again by the light, which penetrates deep into the glazed surfaces, allowing the layer beneath to shine through. Depending on time of day and lighting situation, the works change colour and mood in consequence. This brings them to life.

Carroll’s processual technique is apparent not only in the translucency of the paint layers but also in the canvases themselves, whose composition is constantly changed. The work is not created according to any concept. It develops during the production process and thus finds its identity in the expression of remembrance and transience.

BARBARA CATOIR Lawrence Carroll - As The Noise Falls Away. Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; until 18 March 2018. A catalogue is in preparation.

English translation - Dr. Michael Scuffil Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Barbara Catoir , December 29, 2017. Page 13 © Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , All rights reserved. Provided by Frankfurter Allgemeine Archiv

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Newspaper #15 “As the noise falls away�

Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg November 26, 2017 - March 18; 2018 Thank you to all who made this exhibition possible a special thank you to the wonderful hard working museum staff.

Thank you , Dr. Annegret Laabs Uwe Gellner Andre Buchmann Elena Buchmann Karsten Greve Claudia Greve Galerie Buchmann Galerie Karsten Greve The Panza Collection Erik Herkrath David Carrier Lenders Roberto DePol Alice Paltrinieri Nelly Radak Wendy Lawson writers Uwe Gellner Terry Myers Barbara Catoir Translation, Dr. Michael Scuffil Photography Hans-Wulf Kunze black and white photographs Antonio Maniscalco installation photographs Studio photographs Carroll Studio ; Lucy Jones Carroll Special thanks My lovely darling sweetest ever love of my life , Lucy.