Carroll Dunham
1949–
Carroll Dunham has retained a highly personal style of painting across four decades, investigating the pictorial aspects of painting in works that reveal diverse references, including Surrealism, classical landscape painting, and cartoons. Dunham has also looked to art-historical figures as varied as Gustav Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pontormo, Tarsila do Amaral, and Sidney Nolan, and to his own earlier works. “Painting responds to painting,” Dunham has written.
In recent years Dunham’s imagination has been occupied by scenes of bathers, a popular subject among French artists at the turn of the last century. He worked off and on for six years to create Large Bather (quicksand), which eventually became the centerpiece of a series of six paintings. The stark white bather—her visage hidden and each of her four limbs truncated—jarringly divides the landscape into quadrants, placing her genitalia manifestly visible at the center. It is from this point, demarcated with an X, that Dunham began the composition, building outward. The organizational point of origin may reflect his initial impulse to create the bathers: as Dunham stated, the paintings had “nothing to do with pornography for me: zero. They really have much more to do with my mother and the kind of universality of that: we all have one.” The landscape here initially appears to be a tropical paradise but in fact features felled and severed trees, trampled flowers, and an ominous pool of quicksand—elements that seem to allude to a larger disruption in this natural world.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, graphic artist, graphic designer, lecturer, painter
ULAN identifier
500110733
Names
Carroll Dunham, Caroll Dunham
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 23, 2025.
