Painting Process/Process Painting, MoMA, Carroll Dunham, 2

Amy Sillman layers paint over layers of paint the way Richard Diebenkorn did. Sometimes she loads up her brush like Park, Bischoff or other Bay Area School types. She shmears wet paint across a canvas like Gerhard Richter. Sometimes she dabs it on almost tentatively, as Guston did in his great Turneresque abstractions.

Then there are the compositions themselves. Her diagonals reject a painter’s tendency to grid, the same way Diebenkorn’s did circa Ocean Park. This one recalls Lee Bontecou’s delicate, small hanging sculptures from 1967. A green, red and gray section on the right-hand side of I (2008, below) seems informed by those atmospheric Gustons. The vaguely cartoony shapes in several of the paintings here (including this one) abstract Carroll Dunham’s body parts. And Sillman’s stitching together of seemingly disparate swatches of sometimes garish color and pattern recall 1980s David Hockney. Sillman’s rejection of a traditional, harmonious, palette reminds me of of abstraction from about that period, including Howard Hodgkin, Jonathan Lasker and Thomas Nozkowski.

Critical Response
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Mark Dutcher, Worlds Apart, 2007, acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas, 80 x 92 inches. © Courtesy the Artist and SolwayJones Gallery

Articulate, emotional and committed, Mark Dutcher is a painter’s painter. Dutcher is deeply immersed in the process and act of painting. He is one of those artists whose drive to create is demanding and relentless. Over time, his work has grown and matured, and he easily walks that line between abstraction, expressionism, surrealism and pop. Read more of ArtSlant founder Georgia Fee’s interview with Mark Dutcher at ArtSlant.com.

The more I look at Mark Dutcher’s work the more I enjoy it. There are similarities with Carroll Dunham’s work that I posted yesterday and Fionna Rae’s work as well. It’s a poppy cartoonish abstraction that comes through in the flat synthetic colors, the acrylic textures and floating compositions.

markdutcher.com
www.solwayjonesgallery.com

Today is a Carroll Dunham day. After coming across Sharon Butler’s post on Two Coats of Paint I started trolling around and came across this painting on moma’s site. Dunham’s work is a lot of fun to look at and I can spend a long time with his work. His use of materials is fascinating and inspires me to push and develop my own work. It’s also funny that the title of this painting alludes to my point yesterday when describing my impressions of the Color Charts: Reinventing Color 1950 to Today currently showing at MOMA and I said that the dominate forms seem to be rectangles, squares, or pixels.

Excerpt from moma.org

American painter. He completed a BA at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, in 1971 and later settled in New York. Initially influenced by Post-Minimalism, process art and conceptual art, he was soon attracted to the tactility and allusions to the body in the work of Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Spurred on by the revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, Dunham began to make abstract, biomorphic paintings reminiscent of the work of Arshile Gorky and André Masson, executed with a comic twist enhanced by lurid colours and the suggestion of contemporary psychedelia. In the 1980s he began to paint on wood veneer and rose to prominence in the context of a broader return to painting in the period. Age of Rectangles (1983–5; New York, MOMA) is a highly abstract composition of differing forms, symptomatic of his work at this time: geometric sketches co-exist with eroticized organic shapes while the forms of the wood veneer show through the surface of the paint to suggest surging forces. Towards the end of the 1980s he began to move towards single, dominating motifs; wave-like forms were particularly common. In the Integrated Paintings series he applied paint-covered balls and chips to the surface of the canvas to further develop the sense of organic life. Mound A (1991; priv. col.) is typical of Dunham’s work of the early 1990s in which his forms began to resemble mounds of live matter, covered in orifices. Around 1993 his paintings began to feature schematic, cartoon figures which suggest the influence of Philip Guston.

Morgan Falconer
From Grove Art Online

© 2007 Oxford University Press

Kudos to Sharon Butler at Two Coats of Paint for bringing the Carroll Dunham exhibition to my attention. [Read more...]

In 1983 Klaus Kertess described the aesthetic of these paintings as “self-hallucination which initially suggests a multiple organ transplant performed by a surgeon with a degree in Surrealism.” Although admittedly having drawn inspiration from the likes of Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali, Dunham’s thought process was purely abstract. The sublime nature of the distinguishable figures in these paintings namely the phalluses (Fourth Pine, 1982-84), knobby nipples (Fifth Pine, 1984-85), the tree sprout (Untitled, 1984) allude to a primordial pool, an abstraction of consciousness and formation. In a recent interview regarding this body of work Dunham states, “I was obviously aware I was drawing phalluses (I wasn’t that far gone), but I saw them as symbols, almost as boundary markers, or maybe radioactive objects in a kind of natural environment.”

Carroll Dunham: Paintings on Wood, 1982-87” continues through April 5 at Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79th Street, Manhattan; (212) 737-2060, skarstedt.com