Paul Lorenz
Artist
With an education in Bauhaus architecture, fine art, and music composition, Paul Lorenz has carved an intriguing niche in the international art world: bridging the immediacy of drawing, sound performance, music, and digital collage with the logic and detail of architecture. All media are a balance of physical structure (wood, canvas, paper, mylar); visual structure (brush strokes, scrapes, photographs, lines); and color, whether overt or atmospheric, allowing the creative process to be the final subject.
The recent work in digital photography and collage is a direct response to his recent relocation to Arizona and the Covid-19 pandemic. The daily need to create has made digital exploration a necessity. By pouring through a cache of photographs, decades in the making, new compositions and personal definitions are realized. The combination of imagery and geometry evoke architectural elevations and renderings, something that has always been the essence of Paul’s work, while also being personal reflections of self, life, location and circumstance.
Paul was born in Chicago, but has lived and worked globally through personal moves and residency opportunities. After graduating from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, he went on to study oil painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the International School of Art in Italy (under Nicolas Carone and Irving Petlin) and the University of California, Berkeley. Paul recently completed his MFA in Music Composition from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in February 2019.
Paul exhibits regularly with galleries in the USA and Europe. As a member of Pintura Fresca, an international group of abstract artists, he has exhibited worldwide, with past exhibitions in Australia, Singapore, Austria, England and Sweden. Paul had his first solo exhibition in Europe in 2009 at Galerie Daniel Vignal in Toulouse, France, and was the only US resident artist to participate in the historic Realites Nouvelles exhibition in Paris in 2012 and 2013. While artist-in- residence at the Shangyuan Art Museum near Beijing in 2014, numerous paintings and music scores were created. His latest European exhibition was with Work in Progress Gallery in Brussels, Belgium in 2021, and is currently represented by Bruno Massa Galerie in Paris.
As a performance artist, Paul’s durational pieces, ‘untitled:LINE’ (2016) and ‘Linear Stream’ (2018), performed with his sound ensemble Perception Project, explored interior space and amplified/manipulated line drawing with graphite sticks, microphones and live musicians. His 2019 solo exhibition at Modified Arts in Phoenix, Arizona, combined acoustic sounds of drawing and trumpet.
