Carroll Dunham: Wrestlers

How did we get here? Not just to this schematic savannah, with its lavender sky and single tree, but to this conception of painting—one so regressive and so deliberate, so nearly infantile and at the same time so assured, that it generates a reflexive demurral: the shock of the weird. More than any other living American painter, Carroll Dunham continues to sidestep expectations. In these new paintings of bearded, big-buttocked wrestlers, he pulls us, as he has done again and again, into freshly counterintuitive turf, into a world as far removed from our tech-addled daily lives as it is from any settled avante-garde idiom.
— Alexi Worth

This catalogue documents four interconnected bodies of work: A Wrestling Place series—depicting two Herculean figures mid-tussle against a barren panorama; Self-Examination paintings—a wrestler’s intimately folded body represented within a tensely cropped picture plane; the Wrestler suite—individual portraits of the brawling protagonists standing in profile, facing away from the viewer and exposing scuffed, bruised backs against otherworldly blue backdrops; and The Golden Age­—scenes rendered in pencil on gessoed linen.

With a new essay by Alexi Worth, this catalogue was published in connection with a solo exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, April 28—June 17, 2017. 

Physical description:
Clothbound hardcover with dust jacket; 74 pages, with five gatefolds
Los Angeles: Blum & Poe, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9861128-6-7
10 x 12 inches
Weight: 2 lbs.