Carl Laubin

Carl Laubin
Plus One Gallery is pleased to announce a solo show of paintings by Carl Laubin and the launch of his first book which celebrates the evocative and sophisticated style of this many-sided artist and the way in which he recreates classical and contemporary architecture.

Carl Laubin: Paintings is co-authored by John Russell Taylor and David Watkin in two independent sections. Taylor is Art Critic for The Times and has written over sixty books on Art, Film, Theatre and Cultural History. Watkin is Professor of History of Architecture at the University of Cambridge where he is head of the Department of History of Art and an internationally known writer and historian who has written many books, most recently Radical Classicism: The Architecture of Quinlan Terry.

The exhibition comprises new works which are a reflection of the diverse nature of the paintings documented in Carl Laubin: Paintings.

There are luminous new landscapes which are clearly related to earlier work, but moving in new directions; and there is a series of paintings entitled Verismo based on an anonymous late fifteenth century painting of an ‘Ideal City’. This new series is descended from the Royal Opera House paintings Laubin produced in the 1980’s and reflects a continued interest in the city and its architecture through paintings.

Originally given the working title, "The Effects of Bad Government", Verismo takes the original painting of the 'Ideal City' and imagines it had been built and survived to the present day. It has suffered from age, weather, redevelopment, a market economy and all the clutter that the modern world imposes on the city in the way of street furniture, traffic control, surveillance equipment and, most importantly, the presence of human activity, conspicuously absent in the fifteenth century original.

As to where this city is, Laubin imbues this work with sufficient ambiguity that it could be almost anywhere in the world. 

'The setting is uncertain, but in a "globalized" world styles are imported and exported, copied and adapted so that this could be the alteration of an earlier Italianate development in London or an Italian city centre surrounded by later Modern development'

Painted with the precision of an architect, the detail of a photograph and the creativity of a true artist, Carl Laubin allows us to see beyond what we know and into another world that could have existed and perhaps one day, building on the architecture of today, will.