CARROLL DUNHAM

This show encompasses two different chapters of Dunham’s recent work. The first series are from Dunham’s”Green” project, which began in 2019, has included drawings, prints and paintings, and concludes with this installation. Dunham’s focus on green as an organising principle can be connected to a range of ideas and influences that include the exploration of identity, Science Fiction, Celtic mythology, and fundamental formal concerns in his practice. In drawings that zoom in and out on the subjects, male and female bodies intimately connect, stand alone, gaze into the distance, and moan in agony amidst kryptonite-coloured environments.

The second body of work on view marks the early phases of Dunham’s “Purple People”, an ongoing investigation that has thus far involved drawings and prints, in which the male and female forms vibrate with intense purple hues, amongst other tones of reds, yellows, and blues. The considered transition of the palette from green to purple tones demonstrates the artist’s perpetual examination of the ways in which colour influences visuality and meaning, identity and the human experience. Pulling apart and expanding upon the ways in which colour is attributed to certain existing and imagined elements is demonstrated here with mesmerising impact.

Central to Dunham’s oeuvre is the exploration of various constructions of space within the pictorial plane. As illustrated in many of the drawings included in this show, his recent compositions include a new formal device he has employed to study such spaces. Sharp, black rectilinear structures contain the figures in seemingly psychological environments removed from the tangible world. Without any discernible connections to reality, the characters are bound within these seemingly psychological spaces, proposing new forms of interiority and subjecthood. These internal cells, or perhaps vortexes, recur and morph across the drawings; the cells try, and often fail, to perfectly contain the animated activities shown. These visualisations of new forms of dimensionality reiterate the artist’s continued exploration and boundary pushing formal techniques.

Carroll Dunham was born in 1949 and lives and works in New York and Connecticut. He is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Museum in Oslo, which focuses on his printmaking, on view through May 21,2023. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions including Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Millesgården, Stockholm; Drammens Museum, Drammen, Norway; a mid-career retrospective was held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. In 2021, Dunham was the subject of a major two-person exhibition at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, “Carroll Dunham / Albert Oehlen Bäume / Trees,“which traveled to the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany. Dunham has also been included in notable group exhibitions including multiple Whitney Biennials and SITE Santa Fe; and at institutions including Musée d’artmoderne et contemporain, Geneva; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museu Picasso, Barcelona; and TheInstitute of Contemporary Art, Boston.