Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham – Striking and abstract pictorial explosion in comic style

Carroll Dunham was born in 1949 in New Haven, Connecticut. He underwent his artistic training at Trinity College in Hartford and after graduating in 1972, moved to New York. In the art-friendly environment of the American giant metropole, he worked as an assistant to the painter Dorothea Rockburne, was a graphic artist for the renowned Time Magazine, and finally as teacher at Columbia University. As an artist, however, Carroll Dunham went his own way early on, showing the beginnings and roots of his direct, almost striking and abstract style with his debut at the end of the 1970s. Since his early days, the work of Carroll Dunham has fed from various influences including pop art, graffiti, Surrealism and all kinds of psychedelic pictorial worlds which make Dunham’s pictures seem like utterly over-revved cartoons in garish colours, and which have earned him great international popularity. The artist has largely retained these stylistic basic elements throughout his development over many work phases. 

An increase in figurative elements and sexual allusions

Carroll Dunham intensified the development of his own language of form in the 1980s and, alongside his fundamental abstraction, turned increasingly to figurative elements. In doing so, a unique combination of the opposing stylistic directions was created, one which would become characteristic for Carroll Dunham’s work. The structure of the wooden base on which he painted served as an important inspiration for the artist; he incorporated its properties when painting and allowed them to flow into the design of his figures. One of Dunham’s creations is a figure who initially appeared in the style of film noir with hat and suit and a nose in the shape of a phallus. The supposed assignment of male attributes was contradicted however in the series Mule, when suddenly the same character appeared without trousers and revealed a view of the fleshy vagina. Such sexual connotations pervade Carroll Dunham’s entire work, who occasionally alludes to the teachings of Sigmund Freud, but also achieving a humorous sentiment.

Dunham’s art is tasteless, obscene – and coveted

In 1977, Carroll Dunham met the painter Laurie Simmons, whom he married six years later. Although the artists take different approaches to their work, there is always mutual inspiration and overlap. Dunham’s admirers praise his talent in conveying deep psychological connections through supposed superficially and often rudely ordinary depictions. His provocative pictures have long since found their way into the great galleries of the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London or the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris. Carroll Dunham lives and works in New York. His daughter is the actress Lena Dunham, who became known to a wider audience in 2021 with the series Girls.