This week, once again, art will enliven the heart of Bologna with the usual annual date with Arte Fiera, a long weekend devoted to modern and contemporary art, returning for its 39th edition from 23rd to 26th January. As we wait for the yearly event, why not take advantage of the wide calendar of exhibitions and cultural initiatives thought not just to accompany the fair, but also to help visitors discover numerous museums and sites of art in town. In accordance with this interesting programme, Mambo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna hosts the retrospective of the talented Australian-born, American painter Lawrence Carroll (b. 1954, Melbourne).
The exhibition entitled “Ghost House”, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, presents about sixty works created from the ‘80s up to the present that retrace the artist’s career without following any chronological order. Displaying the affinity with other great artists such as Sean Scully and in particular the Bolognese master Giorgio Morandi, Ghost House (title loosely base on Robert Frost’s poem) is a good occasion to approach Carroll’s poetics, his study of objects and their positioning in the space that gives rise to multiple combinations and interpretations, as well his intimate dimension where everyday life entities reveal the complexity and uncertainty of reality. Carroll’s way of processing paintings turns them into sculptural forms characterized by stratifications of white colour and mixed materials that carry weaves and imperfections like cracks and folds on uneven surfaces. The exhibition path shows different types of work through which Carroll expresses contents and experiences: from the earliest “Cut Paintings”, paintings from which pieces of canvas are cut and put back together, or the “Stacked Paintings”, an accumulation of painted canvas and wood, to the “Calendar Paintings”, attached to the wall in a way that recalls the pages of a book, passing through to the big “Sleeping Paintings”, composed of different pieces of canvas with cut out niches covered with painted pieces of cloth and the metaphorical “Light paintings”, which incorporated light sources and call back the issue of light, always present in the artist’s personal artistic research.
Lawrence Carroll’s “Ghost House” will run until April 6th 2015. The show is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by curator, art critic and professor Angela Vettese.
Monica Lombardi – Images courtesy of Antonio Maniscalco
