“I’ve always been drawing shapes and filling my paintings up with shapes. But I began to see that the shape and its surrounding and the relationship between the shape and its surrounding could be the painting. That seemed like a beautiful idea to me because it was so clear. One to one between me and the painting, between me and the shape.”
—Carroll Dunham Painted in 1992, Down (Mound E) epitomizes Carroll Dunham’s signature style of melding cartoonish semblances of nature with provocative imagery to construct a vibrant fantasy world. The central focus of the painting is a cluster of interlocking anthropomorphic forms, cascading into a deeper valley. Upon closer inspection, the bulging abstraction appears as a scaffold for the suggestive bodily forms of lips, orifices and phallic shapes, transgressing the painting’s abstract nature. Set against an earthy brown background, the riotous colors of the shapes – smooth mulberry, rich azure blue, accents of verdant green and pops of orange – are all woven together in a symphony of contrasts and harmonies, intensifying the painting’s frenzied physical energy. By experimenting with the interplay of form and hue, Dunham explores the relationship between abstraction and figuration, creating a playful yet erotic pictorial landscape where viewers can lose themselves.
“In my private lexicon I call them shapes. They probably have aspects of them that are like characters. They certainly have approached having some kind of personality at times. But they are first and foremost shapes in a figure ground relationship.”
—Carroll Dunham Dunham began painting his distinctive shapes in the 1970s, drawing inspiration from the renewed interest in Surrealism at the time, as well as the realms of Pop Art and graffiti. The artist thus diverged from traditional Surrealist doctrines, infusing his work with cartoonish elements and vivid colors of modern psychedelia. In the 1980s, he began incorporating his characteristically bodily shapes to explore the tension between figure and ground, form and formlessness. Over the decades, Dunham has honed a unique visual language that occupies a distinguishing place in the postmodern landscape of art history. “As modernism broke down and was atomized into the plurality that continues to typify today’s art-making,” Klaus Kertess notes, “Dunham was among the first to seize the new liberty to invent one’s own paradigms and create new worlds.”
Down (Mound E) is a captivating piece from Dunham’s Mound series created in the early 1990s. This series, developed around the same time as his Integrated Paintings series, marks his deeper exploration into the realm of shapes. Dunham describes the two series as different representations of waves. In the Integrated Paintings series, the wave flows and morphs into a T-shaped limb, while in the Mound series, the wave solidifies into a more defined and substantial hill-like structure. Dunham’s work in these two series is deeply inspired by the calligraphic spontaneity of Joan Miró and Roberto Matta, coupled with the provocative imagery of Willem de Kooning. He combines these elements with ancient pictographs and cartoon-like simplicity, bathing his canvases in exuberant color palettes to convey profound emotional experiences.
In Down (Mound E), Dunham masterfully constructs a hallucinatory dreamscape, inviting viewers into an uncharted realm where his unique vocabulary of forms weaves a spell of visual delight and boundless imagination.