PREVIEW: Carroll Dunham

Since the 1970s, Carroll Dunham has developed a unique pictorial language in a significant oeuvre encompassing painting, drawing, print and sculpture. Employing a formal mastery of line, texture and colour, Dunham’s distinctive body of work continually engages new and recurring modes of art-making. Drawing on the art historical canon but also on pop culture including sci-fi and cartoons, Dunham revisits enduring themes that comprise our existence while simultaneously exploring the formal attributes of painting.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Carroll Dunham presents recent drawings made over the past three years. Since the earliest moments of his career, drawing has been a crucial element of Dunham’s artistic practice. Encompassing over 90 works on paper, wood panels and stretched canvases, this exhibition highlights this significant and ever-explorative nature of this part of Dunham’s artmaking process, and also showcases new formal components that he has introduced in his work over the last several years. This show encompasses two different chapters of Dunham’s recent work. The first series are from Dunham’s “Green” project, which began in 2019, has included drawings, prints and paintings, and concludes with this installation. Dunham’s focus on green as an organizing principle can be connected to a range of ideas and influences that include the exploration of identity, Science Fiction, Celtic mythology, and fundamental formal concerns in his practice. In drawings that zoom in and out on the subjects, male and female bodies intimately connect, stand alone, gaze into the distance, and moan in agony amidst kryptonite-colored environments. The second body of work on view marks the early phases of Dunham’s “Purple People”, an ongoing investigation that has thus far involved drawings and prints, in which the male and female forms vibrate with intense purple hues, amongst other tones of reds, yellows, and blues. The considered transition of the palette from green to purple tones demonstrates the artist’s perpetual examination of the ways in which color influences visuality and meaning, identity and the human experience. Pulling apart and expanding upon the ways in which color is attributed to certain existing and imagined elements is demonstrated here with mesmerizing impact. Central to Dunham’s oeuvre is the exploration of various constructions of space within the pictorial plane. As illustrated in many of the drawings included in this show, his recent compositions include a new formal device he has employed to study such spaces. Sharp, black rectilinear structures contain the figures in seemingly psychological environments removed from the tangible world. Without any discernible connections to reality, the characters are bound within these seemingly psychological spaces, proposing new forms of interiority and subjecthood. These internal cells, or perhaps vortexes, recur and morph across the drawings; the cells try, and often fail, to perfectly contain the animated activities shown. These visualizations of new forms of dimensionality reiterate the artist’s continued exploration and boundary pushing formal techniques.

Also, Carroll Dunham presents a new series of monotypes at Gladstone Gallery’s Los Angeles.  Displaying a wide variety of mark-making techniques, these unique works form a continuation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of anthropomorphic green figures. Each composition featured a solitary figure, facing away from the viewer and encased in an angular box, gazing off into the cosmic abyss. Unlike many of Dunham’s works, these figures are caught in a state of stillness; the bodies are not wrestling, nor are they having sex, nor shrieking in pain or passion. Yet the pictures are far from tranquil – they teem with psychological energy. Untethered from the natural world, the characters hang suspended in chambers of human contemplation and propose new forms of interiority and subjecthood.  This series was produced in the studio at Two Palms where the artist has been making prints for over two decades. Through years of experimentation, Dunham has devised new techniques for making monotypes using watercolors and the extreme pressure of a hydraulic press. The resulting body of work has acted as an essential exercise in continually pushing the boundaries of his artistic practice and vision. The term monotype refers to a print created through the transfer of an image from one smooth surface to another. Since there is no reproducible matrix on the original plate, the image can only be transferred once, creating a unique work of art each time. Dunham highlights an essential component of his practice and singular approach to mark-making and depicting figures in space with this new series.

Photo: Carroll Dunham, Untitled, Dec. 11, 2019, 2019, Monotype in watercolor and watercolor pencil on Lanaquarelle, 101 x 126.4 cm, © Carroll Dunham, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery-New York and Brussels

Info; Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 9/5-17/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 & Gladstone Gallery’s Los Angeles Office, 6912 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 14/2/2023- , Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00-17:00 by appointment only, www.gladstonegallery.com/