
Born in Melbourne in 1954, Lawrence Carroll spent his childhood in California and studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 1988 his first solo show was presented in New York followed by his first international exhibition, together with Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman and Robert Ryman among others, curated by Harald Szeeman at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany. Many international solo exhibitions followed at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (1994), the Städtische Galerie im Museum Folkwang in Essen (1994) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1995), the MoCA in Los Angeles (2000), the Hotel des Arts in Toulon (2007), the Museo Correr in Venice (2008). He participated in the Documenta 9 in Kassel and at the Venice Biennale 2013 at the Pavilion of the Holy See. His works are exhibited in several international public collections including the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Museum Folkwang Essen (1994).
Lawrence Carroll died in May 2019 in Cologne, Germany.
In 2022, three years after his passing, the Madre Museum in Naples dedicated the first major museum retrospective to Lawrence Carroll. Curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, the exhibition explores the story and figure of this key protagonist of the North American and international art scene—an artist who cannot be easily placed within the histories of the avant-garde or neo-avant-garde movements.
The exhibition features 80 works created over more than thirty years of his career (from 1985 to 2019), arranged in a layout that—true to Carroll’s own sensibility—favors the relationship between the works, the space, and emotional resonance, rather than a rigid chronological or thematic classification.
Carroll saw his works as physical presences inhabiting space, capable of encountering the viewer and entering into a dialogue. Each of his creations preserves, for this reason, the same imperfection found in human beings and, in his own words, a necessary “anchoring to the world.”
Visita anche Museo Madre, Napoli