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Lot Essay
Perhaps an atom about to explode, a human head erupting with ruminations, a beet pulled from the earth or a hot pink planet rupturing at the seams - Carroll Dunham's Untitled, 1996-1997 depicts a dynamic scene teeming with both sophisticated scribbles and lumbering forms. As described by critic and art historian Robert Storr "Dunham's scrappy, antic, but elegantly offhand lines makes color and surface fight for position and, in the process, show their true stuff. In essence, Dunham's entire production is kind of discursive, frame -by-frame animation of a few basic forms that have a penchant for slipping their contours and oozing into the void around them or, conversely, contracting around smaller voids or cavities inside their lumpy, pitted, tufted skins. Looking at Dunham's pictures in series can be like watching molds growing under a microscope , or sea anemones mutating in radioactive tide pools." ( R. Storr. "Slow burn", Artforum, November 2002, pp 146-151). For Dunham, painting is less about individual subjectivity and instead an amalgam of ideology and technique, it then becomes immaterial to distinguish the meaning of his image. He is an artist engrossed in the practice and ritual of painting.
What lies within Untitled is a frantic cellular structure built up with urgently penciled scribbles , sprouting juicy colored blobs, rubbed and smeared mistakes, a mess and a muck.
Emerging in the 1980s, while the Pictures Generation critiqued the myth of originality and the multicultural frontiers pushed their cultural wars, Dunham's work hums its own Surrealist agenda entrenched in the various angst of this decade onward. Rapid technological change was on the forefront, the Berlin Wall was down, globalization was exploding, the Wall Street market was booming - chaos surely ensued. Dunham's paintings through the 1990s capture this and are abundantly veiled with imagery and symbolism of the time. And somehow within this contemporary dialogue the tic tac toe of doodles and scribbles immediately harken to Cy Twombly's graffiti, the swollen pink bladder can be likened to a creature Philip Guston may have known, the delicate surreal lines pay homage to Joan Miro, and the interest in the grotesque invite a discussion with Jean Dubuffet and his l'hourloupe series. However, beyond this hasty rooting in some of art history's best known painters is an artist fixed in his own vision and metaphor - depicting an existential crisis that is somehow comical and jolting in all its line, sludge and lumps. A hot pink planet, richly coded with meaning.
What lies within Untitled is a frantic cellular structure built up with urgently penciled scribbles , sprouting juicy colored blobs, rubbed and smeared mistakes, a mess and a muck.
Emerging in the 1980s, while the Pictures Generation critiqued the myth of originality and the multicultural frontiers pushed their cultural wars, Dunham's work hums its own Surrealist agenda entrenched in the various angst of this decade onward. Rapid technological change was on the forefront, the Berlin Wall was down, globalization was exploding, the Wall Street market was booming - chaos surely ensued. Dunham's paintings through the 1990s capture this and are abundantly veiled with imagery and symbolism of the time. And somehow within this contemporary dialogue the tic tac toe of doodles and scribbles immediately harken to Cy Twombly's graffiti, the swollen pink bladder can be likened to a creature Philip Guston may have known, the delicate surreal lines pay homage to Joan Miro, and the interest in the grotesque invite a discussion with Jean Dubuffet and his l'hourloupe series. However, beyond this hasty rooting in some of art history's best known painters is an artist fixed in his own vision and metaphor - depicting an existential crisis that is somehow comical and jolting in all its line, sludge and lumps. A hot pink planet, richly coded with meaning.