calendario eventi  :: 

X

19/3/2003

Carroll Dunham

White Cube, London

White Cube is pleased to present a new group of paintings and sculptures by American artist Carroll Dunham. Dunham is known for his vibrant, chromatic semi-abstract paintings that explode with psycho-sexual content and are driven by seemingly aggressive and underlying libidinous energy. The exhibition will include five new paintings as well as five free-standing painted steel sculptures - the first three-dimensional work that the artist has ever exhibited.

Dunham began painting in the 1980's, making pictures on wood veneer that incorporated the grain of the wood as an integral, formal element in the picture, with a shallow depth of field where foreground and background interweave between optical bands of colour. Dunham's work then developed from being vehemently non-representational in the 1980's to a series of paintings in the 1990's that incorporated organic forms that took on human characteristics. Tuberous body parts and strange, primal shapes emerged from sharp blocks of colour with a rude sexuality, comic aggression and insistent physical presence. Psychic, animalistic universes or 'sexual galaxies' as the artist has described them, are peopled with visionless beings who seem to be turning in on themselves with Vaudevillian abandon in a riot of primary colour. Dunham's energetic works are stratified, with different, formal elements within the picture plane creating a volatile union of mind and body, figure and ground, male and female, interior and exterior.

The artist has said of his work that it 'exists in this kind of tension between irrational, almost goofy things and extremely tight, formal, organized things.' His explosion of shapes is tempered by a formal visual acuity and controlled by a strict, graphic line, combining an unsettling mixture of cartoon-like drawing and vivid color. Dunham's art seems to have absorbed the art brut physicality of Jean DuBuffet and fused it with an erotic vernacular akin to illustration or cartoons. His paintings are like journeys - a probing and uncovering of the internal visions of the human mind.

In 2002, the artist embarked on his black and white Mesokingdom paintings in which a single male character dressed in a black suit and hat, half gangster, half religious zealot, wanders alone through visionary landscapes. The paintings in this exhibition, collectively titled Edge of His World, both continue and depart from the themes in those paintings. The character reappears in brightly coloured and starkly painted images of a drastically emptied landscape where he is enlarged, cropped, and truncated by the structural elements of the paintings. These paintings will form a kind of sexual dialogue with the sculptures, which embody images of the female characters that have been absent from the artist's recent paintings.

Carroll Dunham has exhibited widely in both group and solo exhibitions. He recently had his first full career retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

An illustrated catalogue will be available during the exhibition.

Opening Thursday 20th March 6-8pm

Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am - 6pm.

For further information please contact Honey Luard or Susannah Hyman on 020 7930 5373.

White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

stampa

permanent link