From Lowry Hill Gallery:
Lowry Hill Gallery is pleased to present Ideas in Things, an exhibition of new oil and watercolor paintings by St. Paul artist, Andrew Grum Carr.
Known for painting delicate, quiet, moments of observation, his soft-edged marks and veils of color whisper narrative into his urban landscapes. Often composed in dramatic vertical or horizontal orientations, Carr is inspired by artists such as Hiroshige, Degas, and Edmund Dulac.
Carr spent years studying Philosophy and Literature at the University of St. Thomas. Reading, writing, philosophy, and literature are essential aspects of his artistic life and intersect with his drawing and painting in important and implicit ways. In 2025, he partook in a residency at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, an experience that deeply impacted his paintings and writing. During his residency, he produced nine large watercolors depicting locations on the cemetery grounds, along with a long-form personal essay about the Memorial Chapel and his experiences in the midst of grief.
Carr’s new paintings demonstrate his sensitive attention to detail, with colors that appear to gently bleed from their ink outlines, like an energy presenting itself to the viewer. Greens, blues, and chromatic grays bounce around the surface in conversation with the classical forms they inhabit. He writes:
“I’ve taken the title for this show from the American poet William Carlos Williams’ famous dictum: “no ideas but in things.” For Williams the phrase was an exhortation to ground abstract poetic thought in concrete, physical reality. Here I’m using his mantra to point in the opposite direction. I want to draw attention to the ideas that can hide inside a painting. I want to approach painting as another way of thinking. As another type of contemplation.
Each painting in this show, in its own way, is like a train of thought, expressed in lines and colors, in visual relationships instead of words. Not because I set out to paint each piece with a preconceived notion that I wanted to convey. Even now I’m not sure I could name what’s at the heart of each image. But each painting is itself like an attempt to name something.
What are five ducks at the pond a name for? Or a car parked outside an empty museum? What does a painter balancing up on a ladder describe? Or a man fishing the Mississippi beneath the Veterans home? These are the sorts of questions that I want to ask the paintings. And I hope each viewer will bring more of their own.”
Artist Talk: Andrew Grum Carr
Saturday, Apr. 25 • 4–5 PM
Lowry Hill Gallery (1009 W Franklin Ave)