Lawrence Carroll Retrospective at Madre Museum in Naples

The Madre Museum in Naples hosts the first retrospective of Lawrence Carroll (1954-2019), curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, recently appointed director of the Polo Museale Moderno e Contemporaneo di Milano. The exhibition features eighty works spanning from 1985 to 2019, focusing on Carroll's meditative approach to painting materials such as canvas, frame, and color. Carroll's practice is characterized by a metalinguistic discourse that interconnects thinking and making, absorbing symbolic elements related to time, history, and memory. The show includes recent works from 2018-2019 incorporating fragments of everyday life—flowers, stones, light bulbs—embedded in dense, emotionally charged surfaces. A highlight is "Closet" (1994-2003), an open wardrobe containing shoes gifted by Robert Rauschenberg, lace, fabric flowers, a pillow, and a reproduction of Giorgio Morandi, whom Carroll cited as a major influence. The exhibition also features two frozen projects referencing Carroll's freezing painting for the Holy See Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, later reinstalled at MAMbo in Bologna (2014-2015) curated by Maraniello. Carroll described his use of off-white color as a means to cancel himself and create a new starting point. The show is organized non-chronologically, with each room representing a moment of thought and an infinite play on the limits of expression.