“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.” – Carroll Dunham

For over three decades, Carroll Dunham has honed a unique vocabulary of painting that explores the relationship and tension between abstraction and figuration. Borrowing equally from the realms of Surrealism, Pop Art, graffiti and even cartoon imagery, Dunham’s distinctive paintings introduce disorder in an experience of painting that is at once 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 1980s was a pivotal decade in the development of Dunham’s artistic practice. During these years, the artist began incorporating his characteristically bodily shapes that occupy a unique territory somewhere between form and formlessness. Executed in 1989, Green Extension is teased with recognizable imagery that inhabits and pushes up against the borders of the pictorial frame. Rendered in a vivid, Play-Doh palette of reds, blues, greens and yellows, the canvas teems with biomorphic shapes that converge into one another and border on the immaterial. Dunham exposes the false dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, as corporeal features are elongated, warped and twisted until they take on new forms within Dunham’s unique visual language. “In my private lexicon I call them shapes,” Dunham explains. “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, quoted in Betsy Sussler, “Carroll Dunham: Artists in Conversation”, BOMB, Winter 1990, online).

A riotous assemblage of bodily forms, Green Extension is a hallucinatory dreamscape that bends genres. Here, the intimate encounters the brazenly crass in an idiosyncratic display of lurid imagination that borders on the obscene. Replete with contradictions, Green Extension is richly associative and ripe with painterly bravura, ultimately defying easy categorization and pushing the boundaries of taste.