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| Courtesy the artist, Blum & Poe and Gladstone Gallery |
| Carroll Dunham's Sketches for The Alienist (1997) |
Before the New York Studio Program moved from Lower Manhattan to DUMBO, art students there used to gaze from their studios into the apartment painter Carroll Dunham shared with his wife, photo artist Laurie Simmons. Sometimes they could watch the two eating dinner. Maybe they could see the artists' daughters -- Lena Dunham, who now, years later, co-writes and stars in HBO's new series Girls, and her younger sister, Grace Dunham -- but the daughters don't factor into stories I've heard. Even Simmons, who has exhibited her smart photographs of paper dolls, sex dolls and dioramas in New York since 1980, barely warrants mention.
Seeing Carroll Dunham was the coup, which makes sense. For college-age artists trekking through art's past in hopes of finding out what it means to be of the present, he's an attractive pit stop. He's the solitary, obsessive artist who kept painting even after painting had begun to seem passé, who gravitates, as if unable to help himself, toward crude, adolescent, sexual imagery -- his figures have penis-shaped noses, exposed assholes, caricatured breasts, often painted in cartoonish colors. Yet he has the confident hand and compositional savvy of an abstract expressionist, so everything he does, no matter how disturbing, feels serious.
A mini-retrospective of Dunham's drawings opened at Blum & Poe gallery in Culver City just a week after his daughter's show Girls debuted on HBO, and runs through May 26.
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