Carroll Dunham - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Tuesday, November 10, 2015 | Phillips

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

New York Auction 10 November 2015 11am

  • Provenance

    Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris
    Gladstone Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    "I don't have any story I'm illustrating, at least not consciously." – Carroll Dunham, 2012

    At the intersection of imagination, obscenity, and artistic audacity, Carroll Dunham’s Green Box in Yellow Field draws the viewer into a picture plane devoid of space or time, shrouded in a chartreuse haze. Grotesque, emerald pores and wild growths cover the skin of the central figure, and yet the subject, so candid and so resolute in its existence, is not the artist’s fundamental concern. Dunham’s fantastic anatomical abstraction, a biomorphic shape with such personality in its pursed lips, is his vessel for experiments in color, arrangement, structure, and form. Refuting the comic notion that one might extrapolate, the artist has explained, “Sometimes people find my painting funny, and I don’t think they’re funny either. They’re neither dire and freaky nor ironic, but I am trying to have fun while I’m making these things to the extent that that’s possible. I’m trying to let something open up, and that isn’t necessarily what I am as a person, but I can be this way as an artist.” (The artist in conversation with Sharon Butler, “Seriously, what are Carroll Dunham’s paintings about?,” Two Coats of Paint, 2012).

  • Artist Biography

    Carroll Dunham

    American • 1949

    Satire 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.

    View More Works

136

Carroll Dunham

Green Box in Yellow Field

1995
acrylic and pencil on linen
46 x 59 in. (116.8 x 149.9 cm)
Dated "Sept 26, 27 Oct 2 1995 Oct 3 October 13" upper left; further signed and dated "Carroll Dunham 1995" upper right; additionally signed, titled and dated "Carroll Dunham 1995 NYC 'Green Box in a Yellow Field'" along the stretcher.

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Contact Specialist
John McCord
Head Day Sale
New York
+1 212 940 1261

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

New York Auction 10 November 2015 11am