Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Carroll Dunham paints America as it is, without makeup or complacency, with the brutality of a psychoanalyst who has traded his couch for a paintbrush. For several decades, this man has dissected our rawest impulses on canvases that have the effect of slaps administered full in the face to our bourgeois good conscience. His latest works, recently exhibited at Max Hetzler in London in Open Studio & Empty Spaces, confirm what we already knew: Dunham does not paint, he operates open-heart surgery on the Western collective unconscious.
We must face the facts: Carroll Dunham’s work is in the direct lineage of surrealism, but an American surrealism, freed from its European poetic pretensions. Where André Breton sought to “change life” through automatic writing, Dunham changes our perception through what could be called “automatic painting”. His anthropomorphic characters, those famous “dickheads” with phallic noses that have haunted his canvases since the 1990s, are not creatures of fantasy but Jungian archetypes straight out of our collective unconscious.
The artist himself admits it: he draws from “historical art but also from pop culture including science fiction and cartoons”, revising “the enduring themes that make up our existence” [1]. This approach is not trivial. It reveals a deep understanding of the mechanisms of the unconscious as described by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Dunham’s images function like waking dreams, mixing repressed sexuality with popular cultural references to create a pictorial language of formidable effectiveness.
Historical surrealism advocated the “resolution of the main problems of life” through automatism and spontaneous writing. Dunham, on the other hand, resolves our contemporary American contradictions through a figuration that fully assumes its vulgarity. His bathers with geometric shapes and his wrestlers with disproportionate bodies do not seek to sublimate instinct but to expose it in all its crudity. This is how Dunham surpasses his European predecessors: he does not flee reality through dreaming but confronts it through explicitness.
The influence of psychoanalysis on Dunham’s art is not mere inspiration but a method of work. Like the analysand on the Freudian couch, the artist lets his free associations emerge on the canvas. His daily drawings, which he himself compares to a diary, function like analysis sessions where the unconscious dictates its law to the conscious. This approach explains why his characters escape any coherent narrative will to become pure psychic fragments, “clichés of the unconscious” to use Breton’s expression.
The archetypal dimension of his work becomes even more evident when we observe the evolution of his series. His “Bathers” of the 2000s, those naked women with dreadlocks bathing in Edenic landscapes, are not pin-ups but incarnations of the Jungian eternal feminine. They carry within them all the ambivalence of our relationship to nature and sexuality, oscillating between primitive innocence and corrupted knowledge. Dunham thus paints our lost Edens with the precision of a soul cartographer.
This psychoanalytic dimension of his art reaches its apogee in his most recent works from the “Qualiascope” series. The title itself, a learned neologism combining “qualia” (the qualitative properties of conscious experience) and “scope” (the instrument of observation), reveals the artist’s ambition: to observe scientifically the mechanisms of perception and consciousness [2]. These canvases function like machines to reveal the unconscious, pictorial “qualiascopes” that show us what we refuse to see in ourselves.
But what truly distinguishes Dunham from his contemporaries is his innovative understanding of pictorial space as an architecture of the mind. This dimension appears with particular force in his latest works where the artist integrates the representation of his own studio into his compositions. This mise en abyme is not a stylistic exercise but a revelation of the very nature of artistic creation.
Architecture, since Vitruvius, rests on three fundamental principles: solidity (firmitas), utility (utilitas), and beauty (venustas). Dunham diverts these concepts to make them the pillars of a psychic architecture. His painted spaces possess their own structural solidity, that of the unconscious that resists all assaults of reason. They have their own utility, that of revealing our repressed impulses. And they achieve their particular beauty, that convulsive beauty dear to the surrealists that is born from the shock between the expected and the unexpected.
The influence of Andrea Palladio on Western architecture finds an unexpected echo here. Just as the Venetian architect theorized the perfect villa, Dunham theorizes the perfect studio as a place of revelation of the soul. His Open Studio are not representations of workspaces but architectural plans of the unconscious. Each element is arranged according to a logic that escapes reason but obeys the secret laws of desire.
This architectural approach to painting is rooted in a tradition that dates back to Piranesi’s Prisons, those 18th-century engravings that represented impossible carceral architectures. But where Piranesi created spaces of oppression, Dunham designs spaces of liberation. His painted studios are prisons whose bars have been broken by the force of art. The artist appears there as a freed prisoner, naked and triumphant, in a space that is both his real studio and the theater of his imagination.
Dunham’s innovation lies in his ability to make architecture a full-fledged character in his compositions. The walls of his painted studios are not mere decorations but actors in the pictorial dramaturgy. They frame, constrain, and free in turn the human figures that evolve within their limits. This anthropomorphization of architectural space reveals a deep understanding of the links between psyche and environment, between interiority and exteriority.
The influence of deconstructivist architects like Bernard Tschumi or Daniel Libeskind can be felt here, not in form but in spirit. Just as these architects break spatial conventions to reveal new modes of inhabiting, Dunham breaks pictorial conventions to reveal new modes of being. His painted spaces possess that destabilizing quality proper to deconstructivist architecture: they force us to rethink our relationship to space and, by extension, to ourselves.
This architectural dimension of his work reaches its paroxysm in his most recent compositions where the studio becomes a metaphor for consciousness [3]. The objects represented there (easels, canvases, brushes) function as psychic attributes, tools of the soul rather than material instruments. Dunham thus reveals to us that every artist’s studio is first and foremost a laboratory of the mind, a place where thought takes shape in matter.
Carroll Dunham paints contemporary America with the ferocity of a 21st-century Hieronymus Bosch. His deformed creatures, his psychedelic landscapes, his scenes of primitive copulation reveal a nation obsessed with sex and violence, incapable of assuming its impulses other than through pornography or war. The artist thus becomes the ruthless chronicler of a civilization in crisis, that of a country that has lost its moral and spiritual benchmarks.
This critical dimension of his work too often escapes commentators, dazzled by the artist’s technical virtuosity. Yet Dunham’s “Wrestlers”, those naked wrestlers who confront each other in desolate landscapes, are not mere stylistic exercises but political allegories of unprecedented violence. They embody Trumpian America, that America of assumed brutality that prefers force to negotiation, domination to cooperation.
The “men and women of Carroll Dunham have stereotyped physiques, with immediately recognizable characteristics” but “escape any reference to pornography” by their “neutrality and objectivity” [4]. This observation reveals all the subtlety of the artist’s approach. By representing sex with the coldness of an anatomist, Dunham denounces the hypersexualization of American society while revealing what it hides: the inability to live one’s sexuality serenely.
Dunham’s art functions like a deforming mirror held up to contemporary America. His bathers with impossible shapes reveal the American obsession with bodily transformation, that perpetual flight from aging and death. His male characters with phallic noses denounce a toxic masculinity that defines itself only by aggression and domination. His paradisiacal landscapes soiled by human presence illustrate the systematic destruction of nature by industry and greed.
This critical dimension reaches its paroxysm in the most recent works where the artist represents copulation scenes of striking crudity. These “Proof of Concept” are not pornographic works but anthropological studies on the animality of Western man. Dunham reveals there what our civilization prefers to hide: we are only civilized primates, beasts who have learned to speak but not to love.
The influence of African and Oceanic tribal art on Dunham’s work is not fortuitous. Like Dogon masks or Maori totems, his characters possess that power of evocation that transcends realism to touch the essential. They reveal the man behind the citizen, the beast behind the consumer, the impulse behind the reason. In this, Dunham joins the tradition of “Primitive Arts” that never separate the aesthetic from the spiritual, the beautiful from the true.
Today, Carroll Dunham belongs to that generation of artists who have traversed all fashions without ever denying themselves. Trained in the 1970s in contact with triumphant minimalism, he has been able to invent a personal pictorial language that borrows as much from surrealism as from comics, as much from art brut as from abstract expressionism. This synthetic ability makes him one of the most important painters of his generation, alongside David Salle or Julian Schnabel.
But unlike his contemporaries, Dunham has never yielded to the sirens of the art market. His canvases remain faithful to their initial inspiration, that of an art that disturbs more than it decorates, that questions more than it reassures. His recent exhibitions confirm this constancy: “Walking the line between order and chaos, figuration and abstraction, pictorial flatness and depth”, the artist continues to explore the territories of the unconscious with the rigor of a scientist and the passion of a poet.
The influence of Dunham on the younger generations of artists is becoming more and more evident. His ability to mix high and low culture, learned art and popular culture, announces the concerns of 21st-century contemporary art. Artists like Matthew Ritchie or Inka Essenhigh owe him a lot, even if they do not always admit it. Dunham has paved the way for an art that assumes its contradictions without seeking to resolve them, an art that accepts to be vulgar in order to better reveal our humanity.
The future will tell if Carroll Dunham will remain in art history as an innovator or as an epigone. But one thing is certain: he will have succeeded in creating a pictorial universe of rare coherence and evocative power. His characters, once seen, are not forgotten. They settle in our visual memory like beneficial viruses that gradually contaminate our perception of the world. In this, Dunham will have accomplished the mission of every great artist: to change our gaze on ourselves and on our time.
- Galerie Max Hetzler, “Carroll Dunham”, presentation of the artist, 2025.
- Éric Simon, “Carroll Dunham ‘Somatic Transmission & Qualiascope'”, ACTUART, May 2022.
- Galerie Max Hetzler, “Open Studio & Empty Spaces”, exhibition communiqué, 2025.
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Paris, PUF, 1899.
