Carroll Dunham

Fifty years of American artist Carroll Dunham's distinctive, energetic drawings

For five decades, Carroll Dunham (b. 1949) has created paintings, prints, and sometimes sculptures, but drawing has always been the foundation of his practice. He has archived thousands of drawings as part of his daily routine, a selection of which are presented here and many of which have never been published before.

As a young artist in the 1980s, Dunham asserted himself as a painter and worked abstractly at a time when Expressionism was ascendent. In subsequent decades his biomorphic abstractions gave way to outright figuration, with the artist creating hypersexualized, cartoon-like, violent, and sometimes grotesque characters that have been linked to underground comix, West Coast Funk Art, or Midwestern Chicago Imagism. His current work features green and purple people in bucolic landscapes engaged in battle or bacchanal. Other works consider the role of the artist, artist's studio, and art object, deeply influenced by philosophy, psychology, and an examination of gender and sexuality. Featuring about 115 works from the 1970s to today, this volume illuminates the depth of Dunham's drawing practice.

Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition Schedule:

Art Institute of Chicago
(January 31-June 1, 2026)