Skip to Content
Today Open today 11–8

The Search for Orgone: Drawing #1

A work made of brush and black urethane paint, with solvent-diluted gray wash, and spatter, on handmade cream laid paper.
© Carroll Dunham.

Image actions

  • A work made of brush and black urethane paint, with solvent-diluted gray wash, and spatter, on handmade cream laid paper.

Date:

2001

Artist:

Carroll Dunham
American, born 1949

About this artwork

Carroll Dunham has distinguished himself as one of the outstanding draftspeople of his generation. Over the course of his career, he has employed a lexicon of marks and shapes that range in character from pseudo-pornographic crudeness to extreme refinement, from random doodling to precise rendering—sometimes within the same work. His drawings make constant reference to natural forms such as bodily orifices, mutating cells, and sexual and internal organs. Dunham has said that all of his visual ideas progress from a daily drawing practice that is at once rigorously formal and deliberately playful, generating automatic markings that reveal directions, rhythms, or motifs to develop further. His reliance on his subconscious and the practice of automatic drawing are clearly indebted to the Surrealists, and also to popular comics and animated cartoons, and, not least, children’s drawings, with their uninhibited nature.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Prints and Drawings

Artist

Carroll Dunham

Title

The Search for Orgone: Drawing #1

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

2001

Medium

Brush and black urethane paint, with solvent-diluted gray wash, and spatter, on handmade cream laid paper

Dimensions

60 × 78 cm (23 5/8 × 30 3/4 in.)

Credit Line

Margaret Fisher Endowment Fund

Reference Number

2007.518

Copyright

© Carroll Dunham.

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

Share

Sign up for our enewsletter to receive updates.

Learn more

Image actions

Share