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.