Carroll Dunham: Painting & Sculpture 2004-2008

New York artist Carroll Dunham makes figurative paintings and sculptures that frequently draw on that uniquely American dovetailing of Surrealism and cartoon idioms, of which the late Philip Guston would be an obvious instance, resounding with a libidinous zaniness. Dunham has built his pictorial vocabulary over three decades of grappling with the past century's rich heritage of painterly possibilities (including abstraction, which he practiced exclusively for many years); today one can detect traces of Léger, Guston and the various twists and turns of New York painting in the 1980s, when he began making abstractions on wood veneer. In the 1990s, Dunham's claim to fame was a series of cartoonlike organic figures, engaged in a bizarre battle of the sexes. Around the turn of the millennium, a single phallus-nosed character emerged in the work. And recently he has been working on tree-shaped forms. This volume gives an overview of Dunham's recent paintings and sculptures.