ART CITIES:Brussels-Carroll Dunham

Known for cartoonishly surreal painting directly onto wood veneer, Carroll Dunham incorporates the knots and grains of his medium into his sprawling freehand works. Since he began making prints in 1984, in collaboration with Universal Limited Arts Editions, the artist has created many lithographs, relief prints, intaglios, screenprints, and monotype, blurring abstract, geometric and often-provocative anthropomorphic forms.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Carroll Dunham’s forty years career can be characterized by its rigorous indefinability, as his works dip freely into the realms of abstraction, figuration, surrealism, graffiti, pop, even cartoons, without ever settling loyally into any one of them. Carroll Dunham’s solo exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in Berlin focuses on his monotypes, a core component of his multidisciplinary approach to artmaking. Using the themes and visual language prominent throughout his most recent series of male wrestlers. Dunham’s newest wrestlers, all made in 2019 and 2020, are shown engaging in a variety of intense actions situated in vibrant and isolated landscapes. The environments where these men fight are almost completely barren with only a few decipherable trees and horizon lines depicted in the distance. For his Wrestlers series the artist says “Wrestling came to me as an archetypal activity of boys and men, also much represented in art history over a long period of time. I was more interested in the spatial and structural possibilities (two figures in contorted and unusual positions) than the dramatic or narrative aspects, although those levels have become more vivid to me as I’ve gone deeper into the subject matter”. Rendered with saturated purple, blue, green, red, and yellow watercolors, the nude men attack, scratch, choke, and grab at each other in an effort to exert dominance over one another. The men are shown either writhing in pain, as shown by wide opened mouths of men seeming to scream, or are rendered completely stoic with inanimate facial expressions. Pink, brown, and blue scratches, finger smudges, and the artist’s handprints made with watersoluble materials, such as watercolors, pencil, and airbrush, adorn the white bodies, suggesting the blood, dirt, and bruises that accompany these intense flights. Dunham’s intentional inclusion of his hand in this tangible way reiterates his interest in the malleability of the monotype-making process, and suggests an interest in pushing the possibilities of both new and recurring materials he uses in his work. Similar to Dunham’s large-scale paintings, the scenes he creates are confined by sharp black lines that contain the actions and the environments depicted. Here, however, the bodies and colors begin to break past the barriers, further drawing the viewer into these compositions and demonstrating the mutability of the monotype-making process that inspires Dunham’s explorative approach to this medium. At the same time, these narratives overtly connect visually and conceptually to the female and male figures Dunham has continuously returned to through his larger body of work that draws from art history and memory to represent figures and scenes of nature.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels, Duration: 13/3-15/4/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com