Over the course of five decades, Dunham has engaged in wide-ranging formal and thematic experimentation across various media, yet his drawings represent a distinct, interconnected body of work.
Untitled (1976), 1976
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Dunham’s mature artistic career began in 1970s New York amid a scene dominated by Minimalist aesthetics. Using simple elements such as line, shape, and color, he made a tremendous impact with work that nevertheless signaled a return to subject matter. In the intervening decades, Dunham has continued to produce drawings that test, and ultimately collapse, the porous boundaries between abstraction and figuration: bodies shapeshift into buildings, trees pose like models, the cellular resembles the cosmic, and internal organs or private parts are made very public.
Untitled (4/22/93), 1993
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Untitled (4/22/93), 1993
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Untitled (4/23/93), 1993
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Untitled (4/23/93), 1993
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Working in series, Dunham methodically tests out every possible outcome of a drawing’s composition or content. This approach seems to spontaneously yield new imagery and ideas that link one body of work to the next. His influences are likewise wide-ranging—art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary science as well as science fiction and comic books—all of which inform his explorations of the tension between male and female, nature and culture, self and other.
Untitled, 1984–85
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Untitled (1/30/14, 7/25/14, 8/1/14), 2014
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Dunham foregrounds the development of his work by precisely dating each drawing. This practice is evidenced in the thousands of drawings he has organized into an archive, from which this show is derived.
Untitled (3/24/01), 2001
Carroll Dunham
Courtesy of the artist. © Carroll Dunham
Developed in conversation with the artist, this comprehensive survey is the first museum presentation focused exclusively on Dunham’s drawings. Encompassing a 50-year period and featuring many drawings making their public debut, it celebrates the medium central to Dunham’s expansive practice.
A complementary presentation of the artist’s paintings in the museum’s collection is on view in Gallery 294.
Catalogue
Featuring about 115 works from the 1970s to today, this volume illuminates the depth of Dunham’s drawing practice with essays by Makayla Bava, Thea Liberty Nichols, Robert Storr, and Susan Tallman.
Carroll Dunham: Drawings, 1974–2024 is curated by Thea Liberty Nichols, associate research curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.
Sponsors
Support for Carroll Dunham: Drawings, 1974–2024 is provided by an anonymous donor, Joel Wachs, and the Allan McNab Endowed Fund.
