Carroll Dunham drawings at Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago presents Carroll Dunham: Drawings, 1974-2024 on view January 31 through June 1, 2026. Developed in conversation with the artist, this comprehensive survey is the first museum presentation focused exclusively on Dunham’s drawings, and will debut numerous works to the public.
The exhibition will showcase works from the last 50 years of Dunham’s career. Visitors will see how Dunham methodically tests out every possible outcome of a drawing’s form, subject or composition. While the drawings are wide-ranging in style, they appear linked from one body of work to the next within the exhibition, which tracks their development over time.
“Drawing is central to Dunham’s practice and this presentation showcases his incredibly inventive, varied, and yet interconnected work,” Thea Liberty Nichols, associate research curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, said. “Collaborating with Dunham and mining his archive to derive the checklist brought me closer to his process, allowing me to understand his drawings as they relate to one another, as well as to his larger practice. And this show is only possible because he is not only an exemplary artist, but he’s also a meticulous archivist and an incredible collaborator”
Dunham’s influences are wide-ranging—art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary science as well as science fiction and even comic books. These inform his explorations of the tension between male and female, nature and culture, and self. Dunham also foregrounds the development of his work by precisely dating each drawing. This practice is evidenced in the thousands of drawings he has organized into an archive, from which this show is derived.
“For more than five decades, Dunham’s tireless experiments with line, shape, color and perspective have yielded an uncompromising aesthetic that messes with the distinction between figurative and abstract bodies,” James Rondeau, Eloise W. Martin President and Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, said. “This is most evident in his drawings, which this exhibition’s breadth and scope make clear. Carroll’s practice also runs parallel to the creative output of a generation of Chicago artists, specifically the Hairy Who. Inspired by an overlapping array of interests, including Surrealism and comics, they are all formalists at heart.”
Carroll Dunham: Drawings, 1974–2024 is curated by Thea Liberty Nichols, associate research curator, Modern and Contemporary Art. Carroll Dunham’s work is even further explored in a lavishly illustrated catalogue designed by Purtill Family Business, with essays by Robert Storr, Susan Tallman and the curator.
