Carroll Dunham: In the Flowers, The Beach

By 2014 Carroll Dunham's nudes had been running for the better part of a decade, and this slim volume catches the point where the figure stops being isolated and gets pushed into a landscape.

Co-published by Karma, New York, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, in an edition of 750, the 96-page hardcover documents two bodies of work. In the Flowers is a set of seven paintings of cropped nudes surrounded by blossom; The Beach is a single large canvas in which a tree trunk, flowers and a full-bodied nude share the same shallow, hard-edged space. George Pendle supplies the text. The book was produced alongside the gallery's presentation of the work, and preparatory drawings for The Beach, dated 2013, have circulated separately through Presenhuber.

Dunham (b. 1949, New Haven) came out of a 1980s abstraction that gradually turned figurative, and his bathers, wrestlers and tree-and-flower settings have since become his most recognisable subject. The Art Institute of Chicago's Drawings 1974-2024 traces the drawing practice underlying these paintings.