About
One of Dunham's greatest gifts is his ability to comprehend what the culture constructs as real. In turn, it can be fairly said that his paintings, core samples from his own psychological terrain, are touchstones of human emotion. What I see as real in his art is a living strain of painting's impurity, and therefore its future.
—Ronald Jones, "The Funny Biology of Evil," Carroll Dunham: Selected Paintings, 1990–95, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 1995
Gagosian Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Carroll Dunham.
The exhibition is comprised of six paintings that the artist refers to as “portraits,” three male and three female. In them, Dunham continues to use animated figures to explore the formal and psychological issues for which he has become most well known. The new paintings however, have figures that have become much more iconic and monumental.
All of the paintings were worked on simultaneously from late 1999 and throughout most of 2000. The first in the series entitled, Alpha, depicts an archetypal male who is surrounded of by splashes of paint, graphic marks, stains and scribbles. It is clear that inspiration is taken from contemporary masters such as Cy Twombly, Arshile Gorky, Joan Miró and even Jean Dubuffet and William Copley, but Dunham's male is thoroughly contemporary and seems to be caught in the psychology of our present moment.
