Carroll Dunham is an American artist who is best known for his ability to blend the relationship between abstraction and figuration. His eclectic body of work includes painting, drawing, print, and sculpture.
Read MoreDunham's practice goes beyond the limits of tradition by exploring the genres of abstraction, figuration, surrealism, pop art, and cartoons. He employs a unique pictorial language well recognised in contemporary art today.
Carroll Dunham was born in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1972, he graduated with a BA from Trinity College, Connecticut. A year after graduation, Dunham moved to New York City and became an assistant to abstract painter Dorothea Rockburne. This move centred him within the arts scene and gave him contact with artists like Mel Bochner and Barry Le Va.
In 1985, Carroll Dunham had his first exhibition at Baskerville + Watson gallery in New York. During this time, Dunham played with different methods and materials such as painting on wood to create vivid forms of an ambiguous nature. In 1983, Klauss Kertess praised Dunham's early paintings in a review for Artforum magazine.
Carroll Dunham's wife is artist Laurie Simmons, who he lives and works with between Connecticut and New York. They have two children, Lena Dunham and Cyrus Grace Dunham, who are both actors and writers.
Carroll Dunham has a distinct oeuvre. He blends pop culture with art historical conventions to create work that examines concepts which frame our individuality as human beings. Dunham's prints are vivid and bold abstractions with hints of figuration seen in grotesque anamorphic forms. He routinely plays with composition, scale, and orientation. His ability to transform the ordinary into the unfamiliar creates a surreal context that engages all modes of artmaking.
Touching Two Sides (1989-1990) is a print that details shapes reminiscent of living organisms in a cartoon style, with black lines and scratched shading. This type of subject was a recurring theme in Dunham's work throughout the late 1980s and early 90s. This work exemplifies his ability to abstract primitive forms to an almost unrecognisable nature yet yield a personality from them.
In this particular work there are familiar bulges of male and female genitalia squashed beside spiky hairs and intense dark shading. Dunham gives a sense of fluctuating dimensionality to his work by generating anamorphic shapes and filling them with dense patterning.
Four (2000) is strikingly different from Touching Two Sides in that Dunham outlines a female portrait in more traditional cartoonish fashion. There are thick black lines outlining her body and block colours of yellow, pink, and blue filling her frame. Her form seems to almost be an abstraction, reaching towards the edge of the canvas with bared teeth, giving the work a feeling of aggression.
This particular painting signifies a change in Carroll Dunham's practice. Where before, his subjects were only identifiable through abstract diagrams of sexual organs, now they are recognisable as human personalities—female portraits in particular.
Carroll Dunham's 'Wrestlers' series (2017—2018) include his more recent works. These large-scale paintings explore the artist's fascination with the male nude form. The works are playful, sexual, and violent. Vividly coloured scenery functions as a backdrop to solidly outlined men attacking each other. Dunham's compositions were influenced by mythological depictions of wrestlers drawn from research and his own memory.
The move from a focus on female to male figures signifies another change in Dunham's oeuvre. By presenting fighting men in his compositions, Dunham is providing male counterparts to his female portraits. These characters introduce instinctual narratives that depict the raw pain and suffering these men experience, both physically and mentally.
Carroll Dunham has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include Carroll Dunham, Bernier / Eliades Gallery, Athens (2012); Carroll Dunham, Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin (2011); Carroll Dunham, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2007); Carroll Dunham, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2002); Carroll Dunham, New Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (2001); Carroll Dunham: Selected Paintings 1990—95, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1995); Carroll Dunham: Drawings, Gallery Mukai, Tokyo (1991); and Drawings 1982—83, Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich (1988).
Group exhibitions include Group Shoe, Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York (2012); Print/Out, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Painting Now, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2012); Your History is not Our History, Haunch of Venison, New York (2010); Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009); Counterparts: Contemporary Painters and Their Influences, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach (2006); Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005); We Love Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2003); American Art, Galerie Rudolfinum, The Center of Contemporary Art, Prague (2001).
Carroll Dunham is represented by Blum & Poe Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and Gary Tatintsian Gallery. Exhibitions with these galleries include All In One, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2020), New Images of Man, Blum & Poe Gallery, Los Angeles (2020), and Naturally Naked, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow (2019).
Carroll Dunham's website can be found here.
Phoebe Bradford | Ocula | 2021
