BERLIN.- The Buchmann Galerie announces Back to the Cave, a new exhibition of works by Lawrence Carroll (*1954 in Melbourne).

In 1991 after several exhibitions in Germany, the first in 1989 at the Deichtorhallen, Einleuchten, and preparing his final works for documenta 9, Carroll relocated his studio to lower Manhattan, to 244 Front Street. It was here, in this windowless ground floor studio, dubbed "the cave" that Carroll spent several years making small intimate works that pushed the form of painting and it's location in the space. Now some 20 plus years later Carroll has re-investigated these ideas, producing the new works on display here for the first time.

The show features four new types of pictures that were developed in an intensive process over the past few months in his studio in Marquette, Michigan: the Slide Paintings, Hinge Paintings, Tube Paintings and Cut Out Paintings.

Lawrence Carroll’s works straddle the boundary between painting and sculpture with a very poetic, sometimes even autobiographical presence. In his work he develops a pictorial language based on a system of different typologies. Since the 1980s the artist has created around a dozen different picture genres. The names and descriptions indicate, for example, the working process, such as Cut Paintings, Insert Paintings and Stacked Paintings, or give the pictures a character, such as Sleeping Paintings and Freezing Paintings. The names also reflect the presentation itself, as in the Shelf Paintings, Corner Paintings or Table Paintings.

Lawrence Carroll also uses the pictures as a foil for his paintings, always creating a reference to the shape of the object, and hence also to the observer and the room. The artist describes this as follows:

“When I started moving the works around in my studio, I became familiar with paintings leaning against the wall or on each other, or even laying horizontally on the floor. Even these casual placements in my studio, which happened in part for practical reasons, entered my work, became part of its content. The various placements created different tensions. The works started to feel different. Each placement created a psychology. The room would breathe differently depending upon the placements.” (Lawrence Carroll, Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, exh.cat., Ostfildern-Ruit, 1998)

Lawrence Carroll’s works are presented at this year’s Venice Biennale, at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, at Casal Solleric in Palma de Mallorca and the Jumex
Collection in Mexico City.