Carroll Dunham
New York, 515 West 24th Street
Dunham’s newest groups of wrestling matches are set amidst barren landscapes, deserted for all but one single tree, wherein the aggressive men are locked into differing moments of struggle. Employing formal techniques developed throughout his career, the works exemplify Dunham’s unique ability to continually recontextualize his distinct visual language through new and recurring modes of artmaking.
Big Men Up Close/three, 2019-2020 Urethane, acrylic and pencil on linen 45 x 48 inches (114.3 x 121.9 cm)
The exhibition’s first group of paintings, the series Winners and Losers, is organized around an internally referential system, in which a definitive set of formal parameters informs how the figures move and interact with one another. Capturing the conclusion of their fights, these scenes depict the winners, mounted atop the losers, in varying emotional states – some are triumphant, some anguished, others more subdued. The intensity of their prior confrontations is emphasized by the overlapping layers of paint and pencil applied across the surfaces of their bodies. The artist’s brilliant pencilwork is particularly highlighted in a work such as Winners and Losers (4/8), wherein a secondary, apparitional outline of the winner shadows the finished figure. Taken in as a whole, this series both balances and juxtaposes the straightforward logic of a system of formal variables against the physical and psychological mayhem of the scenes depicted.
Installation view, Carroll Dunham, at Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2020.
Other groups of interconnected paintings – Big Men and Big Men Up Close – document the dramatic actions of Dunham’s protagonists mid-fight. In the large-scale Big Men works, Dunham portrays the distress and helplessness of one man at the hands of a stronger opponent. These struggles are memorialized through the impactful scale, as well as the confident, bold outlining of the figures. The acrobatic maneuvers that force their bodies to contort within the boundaries of the picture plane further intensify the dynamism of these complex confrontations. This vitality carries into the series Big Men Up Close, where Dunham tightly crops these fights into smaller, square-format vignettes, reminiscent of earlier bodies of work, such as Edge of His World (2002- 03) and Dead Space (2005). Pushing the figures to the forefront, these works offer a more intimate view of the protagonists, and Dunham renders the stoicism and turmoil of their expressions and choreographies with tremendous detail and emotion. Throughout the works for this exhibition, Dunham demonstrates his fascination and uncanny ability to play with scale, orientation, and composition in order to create vivid, psychologically challenging works that encapsulate the complexity of his subjects’ worlds.
through January 9, 2021
