Dunham’s art appears to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet, fusing it with an erotic lexicon reminiscent of illustration and the anarchic exuberance of cartoons. He composes visceral tableaux in which nude human figures confront the world—simultaneously asserting control and surrendering to chaos. Tuberous body parts and primal shapes emerge from sharp blocks of color, emanating raw sensuality, comic vitality, and an insistent physical presence.

In the late 1970s, Dunham began developing what he refers to as his “primitive” visual language. Initially manifesting as quasi-psychedelic biomorphic abstractions, it evolved to include concrete figures defined with the clarity of coloring-book imagery. Over the years, he has constructed a graphic universe of “nameable things”: trees, flowers, dogs and human bodies. This deliberate avoidance of subtlety serves as an attempt to strip subjects to their visual essence, transforming them into archetypes.

In his famous Bathers series, Carroll Dunham draws inspiration from late-19th- and early-20th-century French painting. The title inevitably recalls Paul Cézanne’s explorations of the bather motif, in which the human body and the surrounding landscape merge into a single structural rhythm. Yet where Cézanne’s compositions sought harmony and balance, Dunham’s reinterpretation disrupts that equilibrium, replacing contemplative stillness with dynamism, chromatic intensity, and a lively, at times ironic immediacy.