CARROLL DUNHAM (b. 1949, New Haven, CT)

'Carroll Dunham Prints: Catalogue Raisonné, 1984-2006'

NEW Hardbound Book

by Allison N. Kemmerer, Elizabeth C. DeRose and Carroll Dunham. Publ. by Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA and Yale University Press, CT, 2008. Hardbound, 256 pp. Dimensions: 11-1/2" x 9-1/2" x 1". Weight: 3-1/2 lbs. BRAND NEW.

Widely known for his vibrant paintings that employ a variety of styles––including abstraction, figuration, pop, and cartoon––Carroll Dunham is also one of the most prolific printmakers of his generation. An integral part of his artistic process, Dunham’s prints combine the spontaneity and drama of his paintings with the careful premeditation demanded of the medium. His imagery––which shares the wickedly cartoony semi-abstractions of his paintings––is transformed, refined, and often intensified in his graphic work.

Carroll Dunham Prints documents the artist’s entire print archive––which includes nearly 300 lithographs, etchings, drypoints, linocuts, wood engravings, screenprints, digital prints, and most recently, monotypes––the majority of which have never before been published. The authors examine the significance of printmaking to Dunham’s overall oeuvre, his innate sensitivity toward the systematic materials and procedures of printmaking, his inventive approach to this process, and the evolution of his imagery. It also features an insightful essay by Dunham that discusses his journey as a printmaker and his discoveries of the medium

Long synthesizing the precedents set by divergent schools of paintings, including Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop, with the cheeky graphics associated with comics and graffiti, Carroll Dunham has been able to create a body of work rich in formal accomplishment and unique in visual content. As amoebic shapes evolved into grotesque figures, his paintings became tacit observations on both painting and society. With each turn of the development, a deeper sense of consciousness reveals itself, as if various psycho-sexual drives churning below percolate to the very surface of the canvas.

The most apparent symptom of these drives would be the fedora-wearing, phallus-nosed character, a lone wanderer along Dunham’s conceptual trajectory. Through landscapes bulging with trash to skewed portraits in which he seems jailed behind the very geometries that outline his singular contours, this character becomes a fetish doll held in the sway of both the artist’s expressions and properties of paint. Perhaps he is a monolithic totem of masochism and psychological surrender, or just a man in a grey flannel suit. Fragmented, castrated, and possibly left for dead, he keeps returning for more. As curator Asmund Thorkildsen says in his essay to Dunham’s recent retrospective of small drawings, “One could say that this figure…is the provisional result of a struggle for survival. He has proved the fittest.” In recent paintings, he appears splayed out across asymmetrical diptychs, exposed and vulnerable, as if Dunham ponders the question of survival at what cost.

Carroll Dunham was born in 1949 and currently lives and works in New York and Connecticut. He has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the New Museum, New York in 2002. His work has been included in several Whitney Biennials and in “Disparaties and Deformations: Our Grotesque,” SITE Santa Fe’s fifth biennial curated by Robert Storr. In 2008 a survey of his complete prints will open at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA.

Dunham began making prints in 1984, when Bill Goldston invited him to print at Universal Limited Arts Edition (ULAE). Since then his investigations into printmaking and collaboration with a variety of printers have produced an innovative body of work that is as large as it is varied. Using a wide range of techniques - lithography, etching, drypoint, linocut, wood engraving, screenprinting, and most recently digital media - Dunham embraces the careful analysis required by the graphic process and has described printing as an integral part of the way he thinks about art making.

Combining the spontaneity and drama of his paintings with the careful premeditation demanded of the print medium, Dunham’s imagery is transformed, refined, and often intensified in his graphic work. While his prints share the wickedly cartoony semi-abstractions of his paintings, they are not merely illustrative, but rather autonomous works of art that explore the formal and perceptual possibilities unique to the printmaking process. Polymorphous shapes realized in richly colored inks, velvety surfaces, and crisply carved lines can simultaneously suggest the internal meanderings of a body's structure, a topographical landscape, or an abstract maze.

SELECT RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS:

2023 
'Carroll Dunham: Where Am I? 1985-2022', The National Museum of Art, Oslo, Norway

2021 
'Carroll Dunham: Qualiascope Paintings and Related Drawings', Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland
'Carroll Dunham / Albert Oehlen', Galerie Max Hetzler, London, UK

2020 
'Carroll Dunham / Albert Oehlen: Bäume / Trees', Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany
'Carroll Dunham: Paintings', Gerhardsen Gerner Museum, Oslo, Norway

2019 
'Carroll Dunham / Michael Williams: Drawings', Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Germany
'Carroll Dunham / Albert Oehlen: Bäume / Trees', Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany
'Carroll Dunham: Recent Paintings', Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland

2018 
'Carroll Dunham', Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY

2017
'Carroll Dunham', Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA 
'Carroll Dunham: Prints', Gerhardsen Gerner, Oslo, Norway

2016
'Carroll Dunham', Inigo Philbrick, London, UK
'Carroll Dunham: Drawings 1982-96', Gladstone 64, New York, NY
'Carroll Dunham: Monotypes', Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland

2015 
'Carroll Dunham: Drawings', Musée d'art Moderne et Contemporain, Genève, Switzerland
'Carroll Dunham', Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY

2014 
'Carroll Dunham', Gerhardsen Gerner, Oslo, Norway
'Carroll Dunham: Drawings', Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
'Carroll Dunham', Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland

2012
'Carroll Dunham', Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY 
'Carroll Dunham: A Drawing Survey', Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA
'Print/Out' (group exhibition), Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY

2011
'Carroll Dunham: Paintings', Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
'Carroll Dunham', Patrick de Brock, Knokke-Heist, Belgium

2010
'Carroll Dunham: Paintings', Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO
'Carroll Dunham', Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA
'Carroll Dunham Prints: A Survey', University Art Museum, University of Albany, Albany, NY
'DISQUIETED' (group exhibition), Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
'The Visible Vagina' (group exhibition), Francis M. Naumann Fine Art and David Nolan Gallery, New York, NY

2009
'Carroll Dunham', Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY
'Carroll Dunham: Works on Paper', Museum Ludwig, Köln, Germany
'Image Matter' (group exhibition), Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY
'Strike a Pose' (group exhibition), Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK

2008
'Carroll Dunham: Painting and Sculpture 2004 - 2008', Millesgården, Lidingö, Sweden
'Carroll Dunham: A Print Survey', Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
'Carroll Dunham: Paintings', Skarstedt Gallery, New York, NY
'Carroll Dunham: A Print Survey', Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH (will travel through 2010)

2007
'Carroll Dunham: Monotypes', Atle Gerhardsen, Berlin, Germany
'Carroll Dunham: Paintings', Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY

2006
'Carroll Dunham: Monotypien', Galerie Fred Jann, Munich, Germany
'Carroll Dunham: In Red Space', White Cube, London, UK
'Carroll Dunham: Small Drawings', Drammens Museum, Drammens, Norway
'Carroll Dunham', Galeri MGM, Oslo, Norway

2005
'Carroll Dunham: Drawing', Judin Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
'Carroll Dunham', Atle Gerhardsen Gallery, Berlin, Germany
'Remote Viewing' (group exhibition), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

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