388
Carroll Dunham
Body of Knowledge
- Estimate
- $200,000 - 300,000
Lot Details
mixed media on assorted wood veneers
signed and dated "Carroll Dunham May 1985 - March 1987" lower right; further signed, titled, inscribed and dated ""Body of Knowledge" 1985-1987 N.Y.C. Carroll Dunham” on the reverse
63 x 37 in. (160 x 94 cm.)
Executed in 1985-87.
Specialist
Full-Cataloguing
Catalogue Essay
"What these paintings add up to is a kind of delirious, barely contained psychic pluralism. Various dualities and contradictions play out: between wood and paint; abstraction and representation; geometry and biology; the phallic and the vaginal; body and mind; nature and culture." Kirk Johnson, "Suggestive Forms That Come Out of the Plywoodwork", The New York Times, March 25, 2008, online
Provenance
Exhibited
Carroll Dunham
American | 1949Satire and sexuality meet Carroll Dunham's vivid brush in the artist's often large-scale fantasy worlds. His eye-popping cartoonish veneer takes a cue from Philip Guston while his primitive "visual language" of faceless figures continues a long line of tradition—think back to Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.Though Dunham jumps between abstraction, figuration, pop, surrealism and cartoon, his works almost exclusively center on the subject of women's sexuality. He also favors painting, though he has delved into prints, works-on-paper and sculpture. His paintings can be seen as contemporary variations on nineteenth-century portraiture of women bathing, injected with similar concerns of those classical and early modernist artists.
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