Carroll Dunham New Haven, CT, USA, b. 1949
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Carroll Dunham by Sasha Rudensky for The New Yorker
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Dunham’s art seems to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet, blending it with an erotic vernacular reminiscent of illustration or cartoons.
b. 1949, New Haven, CT, USA
Works and lives in New York, NY, USA> DOWNLOAD CV
Carroll Dunham is renowned for his vibrant and chromatic semi-abstract paintings that burst with psychosexual content and are driven by an apparent aggressive and libidinous energy.
Dunham’s art seems to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet, blending it with an erotic vernacular reminiscent of illustration or cartoons. He constructs powerful scenes where human figures confront the world in a violent manner that exudes both dominance and lack of control. Tubular body parts and primal shapes emerge from bold blocks of color, conveying a crude sexuality, comic aggression, and an insistent physical presence.
In his famous ‘Bathers’ series Dunham finds inspiration in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century French paintings. Drawing, which forms the foundation of his artistic practice, naturally led him towards portraying “naked human women in natural settings.”
Over his four-decade-long career, Dunham has developed his unique pictorial language. His formal vocabulary initially took the form of quasi-psychedelic biomorphic abstractions and has since evolved to include well-defined concrete figures—such as women, men, and suns—that possess the clarity of images found in coloring books. Dunham has masterfully constructed a graphic world of “nameable things” like trees, flowers, houses, and guns, deliberately avoiding subtlety and striving to distill a subject to its essential visual archetype.
Artist’s works are presented in world most influential art institutions and public collections, such as Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria), Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL, USA), Brooklyn Museum (New York, NY, USA), The Judith Rothschild Foundation (New York, NY, USA), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York, NY, USA), Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) (Chicago, IL, USA), Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) (Los Angeles, CA, USA), Olbricht Collection (Essen, Germany), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA, USA) and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY, USA).
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Works
Carroll Dunham New Haven, CT, USA, b. 1949
Female Portrait (Second Generation, A), 2002-2003Painted aluminum and wood151,1 × 182,9 × 75,2 cm‘The Frozen Shadows and Captured Shadows, two groups of black-painted steel sculptures respectively from 2002-3 and 2004. Using the same series of drawings that had guided his black-and-white paintings from...‘The Frozen Shadows and Captured Shadows, two groups of black-painted steel sculptures respectively from 2002-3 and 2004. Using the same series of drawings that had guided his black-and-white paintings from 2000, Dunham then excised shapes from the drawings out of a single metal plane. He conceptualized the resulting character as feminine, or as reflecting the female figure, which he had previously been unable to formalize coherently in the two dimensions of his paintings. In an homage to Marcel Duchamp or perhaps to Johns, Dunham has described the figures as shadows, implying images projected out of the paintings into another dimension, or into life outside. And yet they have a formal exuberance and an insistent physicality, suggesting an alternative reading as the equivocal presences that had shadowed his masculine character for a decade.’
K. Linker, ‘On the Image in the Mind’s Eye’, in Carroll Dunham: Painting and Sculpture 2004–2008, exh. cat., Millesgården Museum, Lidingö; Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2009
ExhibitionsPublicationsViewing RoomsNews-
Carroll Dunham | Where am I?
February 3 – May 21, 2023 | The National Museum, OsloThe first museum presentation of Carroll Dunham’s prints in Scandinavia will take place at the National Museum of Oslo in January 2023 and will be the second exhibition in the... -
Carroll Dunham, Albert Oehlen | Bäume / Trees
November 30, 2019 – March 1, 2020 | Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, DusseldorfCarroll Dunham and Albert Oehlen will be featured together in an exhibition for the first time at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf. ‘Bäume / Trees’ brings together large-scale paintings spanning three decades and...
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