Robert Carroll was born in Painesville, Ohio in 1934. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1957, at which time he was awarded the Agnes Gund Traveling Scholarship for travel and study abroad. Following two years of military service as a technician he went to Rome, which has become his permanent residence since 1960.

He has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Madison and Washington, D.C. In Europe he has shown in London, Vienna and most consistently Italy with shows in Rome, Milan, Naples, Torino and numerous other cities.

"from an essay by Dario Micacchi" :

" Carroll was ... a resistance figure in the Pop Art invasion of Europe, holding out his humanist lyricism against the movement.

When a painter's imagination, within the tangible experience of life, is so ablaze that it subverts the natural order of things as we know them to such a degree that our habitual and ordinary activities are presented to us, in figurative painting, as extraordinary, prophetic events---then, whoever looks at the paintings finds his imagination fired by a reaction of alarm that turns to panic with the realization that, even when everything is in its proper place and familiar to us, it is al incredible."

Submitted March 2004 by Pat McCormick, Acting Registrar, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.