Artwork
Untitled
Untitled is an ink print by Carroll Dunham. It dates from 1990 and is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
About this work
Overview
Untitled, a 1990 drypoint print by American artist Carroll Dunham, presents a fantastical, dreamlike composition characterized by expressive, scratchy lines and smudged ink.
Subject & Meaning
The print features a dominant, stylized face with exaggerated features—a large eye, thick lashes, a wobbly nose, and a mouth reduced to a squiggly line. Surrounding abstract shapes, resembling mushrooms, roots, or blobs, add to the surreal, possibly subconscious, atmosphere.
Technique & Style
Dunham employed drypoint, etching lines into a plate with a sharp tool, resulting in distinctive, fuzzy edges due to the plate's rough ink-holding properties. The overall aesthetic is deliberately raw and unrefined, with an emphasis on spontaneous, unsmoothed mark-making.
History & Provenance
Created in 1990, during a period of critical acclaim for Dunham's conceptual blend of abstraction and figuration, *Untitled* is now part of The Museum of Modern Art's collection.
Context
This work reflects Dunham's contribution to the late 20th-century resurgence of painting and printmaking, characterized by a return to expressive, often conceptual, practices among artists emerging in the 1970s and 1980s.
Artist & collection
Artist
Carroll Dunham (born November 5, 1949) is an American painter. Working since the late 1970s, Dunham's career reached critical renown in the 1980s when he first exhibited with Baskerville + Watson, a decade during which…
