Carroll Dunham - Contemporary Art Part II New York Tuesday, November 8, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Sonnabend Gallery, New York
    Jablonka Galerie, Cologne

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Dunham’s paintings were seen as part of a ‘new biomorphism’, ‘neosurrealism’, or a ‘new organic abstraction’, positioning them in a history of modern painting with precedents that ranged from Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield to Wassily Kandinksy, Joan Miro, Arshille Gorky, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dali, to Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly. Likewise, Dunham’s connection to other contemporary painter-peers like Bill Jensen and Terry Winters and even Kenny Scharf, Philip Taaffe, and George Condo was widely noted. Dunham’s richly associative, ecstatic works were part of the reinvigoration of painting that occurred in the 1980s. He proved to be original and gifted, helping to expand the discourse of painting and expose the false dichotomy between abstraction and figuration. Dunham and several of his peers provided a meaningful, contemporary extension of abstract expressionism through Pop and Process Art,”
    L. Phillips, “Altered States’, Carroll Dunham Paintings, New York and Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, p. 15.

  • 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.

    View More Works

246

Simple Palette

1989
Mixed media on canvas.
48 1/4 x 78 3/4 in. (122.6 x 200 cm)
Signed and dated "Carroll Dunham July-August, October 1989" upper right

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Contemporary Art Part II

8 November 2011
New York