Biography
With an education in Bauhaus architecture and fine art, Paul Lorenz has carved an intriguing niche in the international art world: bridging the principals and immediacy of painting, drawing and sound with the logic and detail of architecture. All three media are a balance of physical structure (wood, canvas, paper); visual structure (brush strokes, scrapes, tears, lines); and color, whether overt or atmospheric, allowing the process to be the final subject.
Graphite drawings are an important section of Paul’s work. Based upon drafting exercises from his years studying architecture, his drawings depict abstraction in its purest form, geometry. Though minimal in logic, the drawings contain richness in developed space and positive/negative relationships.
The idea behind the graphite drawings is now being developed to encompass sound and composition...audible poetry. Each sound piece starts with a conceptual idea of how math and emotion can combine. The drawing dictates the direction and time, but the composer ultimately dictates the order, the complexity and the flow. Each piece has a distinct structure that every musician is given the freedom to explore within.
Paul was born in Chicago and has lived and worked in Chicago; Berkeley, California and since 2003, Paducah, Kentucky. 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 exhibits with numerous 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. Paul was the only US resident to participate in the historic Realites Nouvelles exhibition in Paris in 2012 and 2013.
Abstraction is not a style, but a state of mind...a way of thinking about action, time and circumstance, confidence and risk-taking, boldness and subtlety.
