Carroll Dunham
Sonnabend Gallery
When Carroll Dunham turned from wood panels to a more conventional ragboard ground in his previous show, the bulbous cartoony forms, which had played off the knotholes and wavy grain of the support, suddenly seemed to face the world directly rather than getting caught up in a self-referential game. In the current show of works on canvas, the hints at bad taste, which Dunham previously leavened by thinning his strident palette and feathering his line into graceful curves, have blossomed into truly bombastic glory.
There’s a playfulness about the images that sometimes descends into adolescent