Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham is an American painter and draftsman known for his distinctive and provocative style that blends abstraction with figurative elements. Born in 1949 in New Haven, Connecticut, Dunham studied at Trinity College in Hartford, where he earned a degree in fine arts in 1972. A prolific conjurer of images, Dunham has been linked to the Surrealism of the early 20th century for his ability to draw from the deep well of his imagination.

Through his art, Dunham is interested in exploring the human form and nature, often infused with a sense of hallucinogenic and psychological tension. Dunham first gained recognition in the 1980s. Working directly on wood veneer, these vibrant compositions combine geometric and organic forms in response to the natural grains of the wood. Towards the late 1980s, the artist turned to a more representational style, with recurring wave-like figures, hatted male subjects, nude female bathers and trees in pastoral landscapes.

Among the main artists of North American Neo-Expressionists in the early 1980s, Dunham went beyond the borders of the New Image Painting movement by widening its stylistic repertoire under the influence of Philip Guston and Ashlie Gorky through the introduction of elements from comics, science fiction and pop culture. Dunham’s art developed an extremely intriguing and idiosyncratic language in which the tree, having first emerged in the background of his late-1990s paintings, was brought to the foreground of his works — first together with images of bathers, then alone — to combine both subjective feelings and art-historical awareness.

Original, often unpredictable, and impossible to pigeonhole into one trend or art movement, Carroll Dunham has been nurturing the discourse around abstraction and figuration for over four decades. His works now belong in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and more.