Carroll Dunham: Index

by Carroll Dunham (Artist)

Writing in the New York Times , critic Ken Johnson observed that over the years the New York painter Carroll Dunham "has evolved restlessly while steering by the lights of a constant constellation of primal instinct, civilization, modern painting and comedy." (He also calls Dunham's subjects "big-headed male and female troglydites.") This comprehensive look at almost 15 years of small drawings finds Dunham's exuberant fedoras, phallic symbols and anthropomorphized amoebae consistent through more than a decade-and-a-half of stylistic growth and change. Dunham's work has appeared in, among other exhibitions, more than one Whitney Biennial and in a major 2002 retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and has been covered in Artforum, Vogue, Newsweek and the New Yorker. Dunham occasionally writes for Artforum , and he is represented by Barbara Gladstone in New York.

Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Lisa E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has a comprehensive series of illustrations and a long essay that is interesting and insightful, but the text is absolutely rife with errors as it attempts to reference the drawings by date (the book is unpaginated and without figure numbers, with the drawings arranged chronologically and most of them are legibly dated by the artist). It is actually impossible to determine at points whether the author is referring to drawings that aren’t illustrated or just has the dates totally wrong, making the text difficult to understand, and this could have been easily corrected had any attention been paid in editing.