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Carroll Dunham
Carroll Dunham makes graphic, semi-figurative paintings that combine an unsettling mixture of cartoon-like drawing with chromatic, vivid colour. His paintings and sculptures explode with psycho-sexual content and are driven by an aggressive and libidinous energy.
Dunham began painting in the 1980s, making pictures on wood veneer that incorporated the grain of the wood as an integral element in the picture, with a shallow depth of field where foreground and background interweave between optical bands of colour. Dunham's work then developed from being vehemently non-representational in the 1980s to a series of paintings in the 1990s that incorporated organic forms with human characteristics. Tuberous body parts and strange, primal shapes emerged from sharp blocks of colour with a rude sexuality, comic aggression and insistent physical presence. Dunham's works are stratified with different formal elements within the picture plane, creating a volatile union of mind and body, figure and ground, male and female, interior and exterior. Frequently, as in his Mesokingdom series of paintings, Dunham uses a set of characters in different scenarios to create an implied narrative across several canvases.
Carroll Dunham was born in 1949 in New Haven, Connecticut and lives and works in New York and Connecticut. He has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions internationally including Whitney Biennial (1995, 1991), ‘Examining Pictures’, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999) and ‘Urgent Painting’, ARC, Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2002). Solo exhibitions include Metro Pictures, New York (1997, 1999, 2002), White Cube, (1998, 2003), New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2002) and Gladstone Gallery, New York (2004).
More on Carroll Dunham
| Artworks | |
 | II 4 Images |
 | III 4 Images |
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Exhibitions | |
| In Red Space 27 Oct—9 Dec 2006 | |
| Carroll Dunham 21 Mar—19 Apr 2003 | |
| Artist's Publications Available in the Bookshop |
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| Carroll Dunham 2006 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.newmuseum.org/mo... New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York | |
| http://www.moma.org/collect... Museum of Modern Art, New York | |
| http://www.barbarakrakowgal... Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston | |
| http://www.gladstonegallery... Gladstone Gallery, New York | |
| http://www.tate.org.uk/serv... Tate Online | |
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