Curated by Dan Cameron

Carroll Dunham’s canvases of the past several years make a neat mess of the still-fruitful territory between abstraction and figuration. Blobs of paint morphed into puffy creatures, and more recently into phallic-nosed alpha males impotently shooting at one another. This fall we’re caught in the cross fire at a two-decade survey of Dunham’s work, organized by New Museum director Lisa Phillips and senior curator Dan Cameron (the latter joins novelist A.M. Homes, critics Sanford Schwartz and Klaus Kertess, and artist Matthew Richie in the accompanying catalogue). The exhibition includes over forty paintings and drawings, revealing the full breadth of Dunham’s references, from Surrealism and ’60s-era Eccentric Abstraction to cartoons and wood veneer.

— Scott Rothkopf