Carroll Dunham

Carroll Dunham showcases fifty years of the distinctive and energetic drawings by the American artist Carroll Dunham.

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, with many being published for the first time.

As a young artist in the 1980s, Dunham asserted himself as a painter, working abstractly at a time when Expressionism was ascendant. In subsequent decades, his biomorphic abstractions gave way to outright figuration. The artist created hypersexualised, cartoon-like, violent, and sometimes grotesque characters 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)