Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham (born November 5, 1949) is an American painter. Working since the late 1970s, Dunham's career reached critical renown in the 1980s when he first exhibited with Baskerville + Watson, a decade during which many artists returned to painting. He is known for his conceptual approach to painting and drawing and his interest in exploring the relationship between abstraction and figuration. Of his body of work, Johanna Burton writes, "Dunham's career can be characterized by its rigorous indefinability, as his works dip freely into the realms of abstraction, figuration, surrealism, graffiti, pop, even cartoons, without ever settling loyally into any one of them." David Pagel, in a Los Angeles Times review intended to be complimentary, described his paintings as "vulgar beyond belief..." Early life Dunham was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. His parents were Carroll Dunham IV (1919-1995), a Harvard-educated poultry farmer and residential real-estate realtor "active in trade associations, politics, and civic affairs" who "came from great wealth, which he had squandered on a series of misguided investments," and Mount Holyoke College and Yale School of Nursing alumna Carol Marguerite (1915-2000), née Reynolds, a nurse and realtor. He grew up in Old Lyme, a hotbed for American impressionism in the early 20th century. His aunt was a Sunday painter. The Dunham family are cousins of the Tiffany family, prominent in the jewelry trade. In 1972, Dunham received a BA from Trinity College in Connecticut. In 1973, he moved to New York City, in a loft on 26th Street, and started working as an assistant to artist Dorothea Rockburne. Work