‘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