CARROLL DUNHAM: The Search for Orgone

Beginning September 14, Carroll Dunham will exhibit a new series of new black and white works on paper at Nolan/Eckman Gallery. This work feels especially candid and spontaneous -- ink splatters and bleeds across the image. The exhibition is focused on the artist's unique variations on the figure. Each work features a comic, fierce and sexually protuberant man, who seems to be raging against solitary confinement within a turbulent universe.

Dunham is fascinated by the primal foundation of the human personality, stripped of moderation and repression. Dunham's habitual full psychic disclosure has been compared to the unselfconscious quality of children's art. But there are many sources of influence: from psychedelia to Mayan carvings and psychology, and artists such as Guston and Kandinsky. The exhibition features a series of drawings entitled "Orgone Accumulator" which refer to the highly controversial theories postulated by the Austrian psychoanalyst and biophysicist, Wilhelm Reich (1897- 1957).

Carroll Dunham was born in 1949. He has exhibited at Nolan/Eckman Gallery since 1992.