Sharon Butler over at Two Coats of Paint has a great piece where she writes about her summer studio and adjusting  her work to the limitations of her studio. I have recently done the same with my own work and have been energized and inspired. It was such a revelation when I figured out it was easier to adjust my work to the studio than to try to adjust the studio to the work, especially in NYC. Now instead of being frustrated and pissed-off and not painting because I don’t have a huge loft in Tribeca or Williamsburg or Dumbo, I can just be happy painting instead…

Sharon Butler, So Long, Little Shack

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