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Artworks
Carroll Dunham New Haven, CT, USA, b. 1949
The Golden Age (8), 2016Pencil on gessoed linen56,7 x 73,8 x 2,4 cm
64 x 79,2 x 4,9 cm (framed)Further images
Dunham’s art seems to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet and fused it with an erotic vernacular akin to illustration or cartoons. He creates forceful scenes in...Dunham’s art seems to have absorbed the Art Brut physicality of Jean Dubuffet and fused it with an erotic vernacular akin to illustration or cartoons. He creates forceful scenes in which human figures violently face off against the world in ways that seem both in charge and out of control. Tuberous body parts and primal shapes emerge from sharp blocks of color with a rude sexuality, comic aggression and insistent physical presence.
Alike George Condo at the beginning of his career, Dunham started what he now calls the Bathers, being drawn to late 19th-century and early 20th-century French paintings. Drawing, the foundation of his art practice, led him intuitively toward what he calls “naked human woman in a natural setting.”
In the late ’70s, Dunham began creating what he calls his “primitive” visual language. This formal vocabulary originally manifested as quasi-psychedelic biomorphic abstractions and has since evolved to include concrete figures — women, men, suns — that are as clearly defined as those in a coloring book. He’s slowly built a graphic world of “nameable things” — tree, flower, house, gun — in a purposeful evasion of subtlety, an attempt to purge a subject of its nuance and reduce it to an essential visual archetype.Exhibitions
Naturally Naked. Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Aug 15–Dec 28, 2019
Carroll Dunham. Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, Apr 28–Jun 17, 2017Publications
Carroll Dunham ‘Wrestlers’. Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, 2017. Text by Alexi Worth, pp. 28–29
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