Carroll Dunham: Paintings and Drawings

April 4- May 31, 1997

Organized by the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, guest curator Phyllis Plous “Transcending the explainable, Carroll Dunham’s art is open- ended and fragmented. He is committed to abstract practices that span generations and sensibilities; to visual thinking; and to an excavation, via line, of a psychological landscape of felt experience. When he began working in the seventies he resolved to jettison the exhausted paradigms and rhetorical taboos of high modernism while employing formal discipline, content and context to find a new continuity for painting. Dunham has been working as an artist for more than twenty years. His development has been intentional and considered one and his recent paintings and drawings, remarkably accomplished and audacious, reflect an intense, unwavering maturation. In the nineties, Dunham’s works have reached new levels of significance. Spontaneous but rigorous concoctions of line, color, space, and shape, they infuse the contemporary painting enterprise with exuberant vitality and fresh ideas.” - Excerpt from the essay by Phyllis Plous