136. Carroll Dunham
b. 1949
Green Box in Yellow Field, 1995 acrylic and pencil on linen 46 x 59 in. (116.8 x 149.9 cm) Dated “Sept 26, 27 Oct 2 1995 Oct 3 October 13” upper left; further signed and dated “Carroll Dunham 1995” upper right; additionally signed, titled and dated “Carroll Dunham 1995 NYC ‘Green Box in a Yellow Field’” along the stretcher. Estimate $200,000-300,000 Provenance Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris Gladstone Gallery, New York
“I don’t have any story I’m illustrating, at least not consciously.” Carroll Dunham, 2012
At the intersection of imagination, obscenity, and artistic audacity, Carroll Dunham’s Green Box in Yellow Field draws the viewer into a picture plane devoid of space or time, shrouded in a chartreuse haze. Grotesque, emerald pores and wild growths cover the skin of the central figure, and yet the subject, so candid and so resolute in its existence, is not the artist’s fundamental concern. Dunham’s fantastic anatomical abstraction, a biomorphic shape with such personality in its pursed lips, is his vessel for experiments in color, arrangement, structure, and form. Refuting the comic notion that one might extrapolate, the artist has explained, “Sometimes people find my painting funny, and I don’t think they’re funny either. They’re neither dire and freaky nor ironic, but I am trying to have fun while I’m making these things to the extent that that’s possible. I’m trying to let something open up, and that isn’t necessarily what I am as a person, but I can be this way as an artist.” (The artist in conversation with Sharon Butler, “Seriously, what are Carroll Dunham’s paintings about?,” Two Coats of Paint, 2012).
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