This week: Guest interviewer Anna Kunz (accompanied by Pamela Fraser) talks to Carroll Dunham about his show at He Said/She Said and more!American painter. He completed a BA at Trinity College, Hartford, CT,
in 1971 and later settled in New York. Initially influenced by
Post-Minimalism, process art and conceptual art,
he was soon attracted to the tactility and allusions to the body in the
work of Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Spurred on by
the revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, Dunham began to
make abstract, biomorphic paintings reminiscent of the work of Arshile
Gorky and André Masson, executed with a comic twist enhanced by lurid
colours and the suggestion of contemporary psychedelia. In the 1980s he
began to paint on wood veneer and rose to prominence in the context of
a broader return to painting in the period. Age of Rectangles
(1983–5; New York, MOMA) is a highly abstract composition of differing
forms, symptomatic of his work at this time: geometric sketches
co-exist with eroticized organic shapes while the forms of the wood
veneer show through the surface of the paint to suggest surging forces.
Towards the end of the 1980s he began to move towards single,
dominating motifs; wave-like forms were particularly common. In the Integrated Paintings series he applied paint-covered balls and chips to the surface of the canvas to further develop the sense of organic life. Mound A
(1991; priv. col.) is typical of Dunham’s work of the early 1990s in
which his forms began to resemble mounds of live matter, covered in
orifices. Around 1993 his paintings began to feature schematic, cartoon
figures which suggest the influence of Philip Guston.