What do we surrender when we stop noticing what shapes us?

My work explores how we adapt to increasingly complex and unstable environments, and how the systems we inhabit shape our sense of self and our understanding of reality in ways we may not fully recognize. I am drawn to extremophiles - organisms that survive in conditions most life cannot tolerate - as a way of considering our own capacity to adapt, and what we may lose when adaptation becomes habitual. 

My paintings bring disparate materials into unstable relationships: painted plastic meshes, roofing materials, and resin alongside natural fibers, animal hair, charcoal, ink, and acrylic. Materials built to withstand weather and load share the surface with threads that barely hold their own weight. I manipulate them through processes that purposely resist precise control, letting material behavior, chance, and accumulated decisions redirect each painting. Gestures, fragments, and surfaces appear to move, tear, and come apart, while asymmetrical compositions hold a shifting balance without fully resolving. I look for the point at which I can stop a painting while its process of becoming remains palpable-when it reads less as finished than as adapted.

Lawrence Lange is an American abstract painter based in Houston, Texas. After 20 years working in architecture, he redirects an instinct for precision, structure, and control toward a painting practice in which outcomes remain open and evolving. He studied fine art and graphic design before earning a Bachelor of Design from the University of Florida and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University in 2003.