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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Print Collection   Carroll Dunham (American, born 1949) Although Carroll Dunham is perhaps best known as a painter, he is a prolific draftsman, and for nearly twenty-years has been an imaginative and experimental printmaker. He has worked with a number of printers and publishers, and these projects have included single prints and portfolios, as well as livres d’artiste, executed in a wide variety of printmaking processes. His early work vacillated between abstraction and biomorphic shapes, sometimes with erotic overtones. In his recent paintings, drawings, prints and illustrated books, he has explored the vocabulary of cartoons and caricature, pop culture and even Mayan pictorial conventions, while still fusing figuration with abstraction . The all-over energy of his earlier, more abstract imagery is channeled into his angry, funny, frightening, and sometimes strangely heroic homunculi. For several years Dunham compiled a series of drawings of these aggressive
personas, drawn on small pieces of scrap paper. When he realized the drawings,
made with a Sharpie, were fading, he turned to Leslie Miller of Grenfell Press,
who has printed and published a number of his relief prints. They scanned
the drawings and from the scans created photopolymer plates, which were printed
by hand, as letterpress, on hand-made Bodleian paper. Each image was then
hand-cut, simulating the “look” of the original scrap paper, and
these “scraps” then placed within folded enclosures of Goyu paper,
and the Goyu sheets bound together in an album. Though this artist’s
book is wordless, it provides a visual encyclopedia that speaks eloquently
about Dunham’s art over the past few years, surveying the lively range
of his disturbing, comic, energized imagery. Photographic Services & Permissions Back
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