Over the past three decades, Carroll Dunham has honed a unique vocabulary of painting exploring the relationship and tension between abstraction and figuration. Borrowing equally from the realms of surrealism, graffiti, pop, and even cartoon imagery, Dunham’s distinctive paintings introduce disorder in an experience of painting that is at once both accomplished and uncivilized. In Dunham’s singular universe, images of growth and destruction converge in vibrant pictorial landscapes that exalt the inextricable relationship between the beautiful and the grotesque.
The early to mid-eighties represent a pivotal time in the development of Dunham’s artistic practice. From 1982-1987, he created an important series of highly-acclaimed works, including the present lot Body of Knowledge, 1985-1987, using casein and dry pigment to paint directly onto wood veneers. By tracing the wood’s inherent knots and ripples and allowing the medium to be his muse, Dunham described this body of work as having a profound influence on the development of his pictorial compositions moving forward.
In an interview regarding this body of work he states, “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.” (BOMB, Artist in Conversation, Carroll Dunham by Betsy Sussler, 1990)
It was also during this period that Dunham’s shapes began to take on their characteristic bodily forms. In these works, the natural characteristics of the wood grain gives way to a myriad of corporal features. Dunham rendered Body of Knowledge with fleshy pinks and peaches, highlighting the anthropomorphic nature of the shapes. He sets these organic hues against psychedelic colors that reveal the crude nature of the wooden surface beneath. In discussing this body of work, Ken Johnson writes, "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." (K. Johnson, "Suggestive Forms That Come Out of the Plywoodwork", The New York Times, March 25, 2008)
While teased with recognizable imagery, the characters in Dunham’s paintings occupy a unique territory somewhere between form and formlessness. The current lot is a defining example of how the content in Dunham’s paintings is replete with contradictions, defying easy categorization, eschewing genres, and pushing the boundaries of taste.
