Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham is an American artist known for his abstract paintings and prints, which often feature bright colors, biomorphic shapes, and suggestive forms. He was born in 1949 in New Haven, Connecticut and grew up in Woodstock, New York.

Dunham studied at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and later received an MFA from the Yale School of Art. He emerged on the New York art scene in the early 1980s, during a period that saw the rise of the Neo-Expressionist movement.

Dunham's early work was characterized by its use of bold colors, abstract forms, and an interest in the tension between representation and abstraction. His paintings often featured organic shapes that hinted at figuration without being explicitly representational.

In the 1990s, Dunham's work became more explicitly figurative, and he began to incorporate cartoonish characters and forms into his paintings. These figures often appeared in strange and surreal landscapes, and seemed to suggest both a fascination with and a critique of popular culture.

Dunham's work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, and is held in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

In recent years, Dunham has returned to abstraction, creating works that are more densely layered and complex than his earlier paintings. Despite these changes, his work continues to be characterized by its playful and irreverent approach to form and color, and its interest in exploring the boundaries between representation and abstraction.