While in the Eighties we witness the historicization of Pop Art in the United States, the exhaustion of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Lawrence Carroll (Melbourne 1954 - Cologne 2019) moves to a euphoric New York where, as long as he works as a graphic illustrator, he gives life to his first works, not attributable to a specific trend: right from the start his paintings are instruments of investigation of making painting beyond the schools and theories of the second post-war period.

Three years after his death, the Madre di Napoli dedicates the first major museum retrospective to Lawrence Carroll. The exhibition - curated by Gianfranco Maraniello - investigates the history and figure of this protagonist of the North American and international art scene, not comparable to the history of the avant-garde and neo-avant-gardes.

The exhibition presents 80 works by the artist created in the course of over thirty years of career (from 1985 to 2019), set up in a path that - as in Carroll's own feeling - privileges the relationships of the works with space and with feelings with respect to the paralyzing chronological or thematic classification. Carroll in fact considered his works to be physical presences that inhabit spaces and that meet the observer, entering into dialogue with them. Each of his creations therefore maintains the same imperfection of the human being and, using his own words, a necessary "anchoring to the world".