Painting And Sculpture 2004-2008

Painting and Sculpture 2004-2008 surveys four years of new work by Carroll Dunham, the New York painter known for pushing cartoon-inflected, sexually charged figuration through decades of engagement with abstraction.

JRP|Ringier published the catalogue in 2009, with an essay by critic Kate Linker and editing by Atle Gerhardsen and Isabella Nilsson, tied to an exhibition at Millesgarden in Stockholm. The 144-page hardcover reproduces 67 color plates covering the period when Dunham's single, phallus-nosed figure of the early 2000s began giving way to the tree-shaped forms he took up next, alongside sculpture made in the same years.

Dunham has moved between abstraction and figuration across a long career: he showed geometric abstractions on wood veneer in the 1980s, then worked through a series of grotesque, sexually charged cartoon figures locked in combat through the 1990s, before narrowing by the turn of the millennium to the single-character paintings this volume tracks. His pictorial vocabulary carries traces of Fernand Léger and Philip Guston, filtered through the New York painting scene he came up in during the 1980s.