Carroll Dunham - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Sunday, June 28, 2015 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Sonnabend, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Sonnabend Gallery, Carroll Dunham, March 1993

  • Literature

    H. Cotter, "Carroll Dunham," Art in Review, The New York Times, March 5, 1993 (illustrated)
    A. Danto, "After the End of Art," Artforum, vol. XXXI, no. 8, April 1993, p.66 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Carroll Dunham’s expansive body of work teeters between abstraction and figuration. Over the past three decades his creations have touched on the obscene, the absurd and the unpredictable; describing his forms as part of a ‘homeless vocabulary,’ Dunham remains loyal to what he refers to as ‘structural archetypes that are kind of locked in.’ (Carroll Dunham, Painting Process/Process Painting, MOMA Lecture, September 2007).

    Discussing the figures that populate his images, from humanoid protagonists with phallic noses to the Freudian topography of the present lot, Dunham relates: ‘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 in Betsy Sussler, ‘Carroll Dunham: Artists in Conversation,’ BOMB, Winter 1990). In Mound F, queasy greens and browns compete with psychedelic Play-Doh tones amid a riotous assemblage of mouth and vulva-like forms; hints of growth, suppuration and tumescence fill a hallucinatory dreamscape. The intimate encounters the boldly crass in an idiosyncratic display of lurid imagination and painterly bravura.

  • 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.

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MOUND F

1992
mixed media on linen
152.4 x 228.6 cm (60 x 90 in.)
Signed and dated 'Carroll Dunham 1992' lower right. Further signed, titled and dated '"Mound F" 1992 Carroll Dunham' on the stretcher.

Estimate
£120,000 - 180,000 

Sold for £194,500

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art, London
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 29 June 2015 7pm