Exploration and radical change have distinguished Carroll Dunham's drawings since his mature beginnings in the late 1970's. This exhibition documents 17 years of his varied deployment of line--controlled but delirious--as it moves abstractly over wood veneer, around biomorphic landscapes, and into eruptive blobs and gobs.

His audacious imagery has proceeded from disembodied shapes to vividly colored planets and rectangular extrusions, to eyeless demons in emotionally taut interiors. Beginning in 1994, more straightforward figurative elements appeared: mouths, hair, and sexual organs. Cartooned suggestions of humanoid forms matured to nearly complete personifications in 1998. Some of Dunham's most recent works have again shifted toward the abstract. Dunham's extreme approaches to invention and style have separated him from the cliché-ridden pack.

This drawings exhibition includes more than 40 works on paper. Carroll Dunham was born in 1949 and he has shown at Nolan/Eckman since 1991.