Carroll Dunham's graphic works at Norway's National Museum

The American artist Carroll Dunham is known internationally for his paintings, drawings, and prints. A new exhibition at Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design shows a selection of his print portfolios from the mid-1980s up until today.

Carroll Dunham
Where am I? Prints 1985–2022
3 February–21 May 2023

Dunham’s prints show considerable range in their expressivity, motifs, and themes. Inspired by his surroundings, personal experience, art history, and pop culture, he directs his gaze at subjects large and small – everything from science fiction and the infinity of the universe to the physical body and the representation of leaves on a tree.

Since the mid-1980s, he has been exploring a range of techniques including lithography, etching, linocut, woodcut, and silkscreen printing. Dunham has worked with several of the most renowned print workshops in the US.

Dunham’s pictures are rooted in art history, pop culture, and the artist’s personal life. He often works in series and has a fondness for print portfolios that gather individual prints together into an inclusive whole. The exhibition shows print portfolios from the mid-1980s through to the present, allowing the viewer to trace the artist’s development from abstraction to the figures that make their first appearance in the early 1990s. It includes several of his best known and most iconic motifs, such as bathers (Where am I?), wrestlers (Wrestlers) and trees (Tree).

The exhibition is the first museum exhibition of Dunham’s prints in the Nordic region. It is based on a significant gift from the artist to the National Museum, consisting of no less than 161 prints dating from the 1980s to the present. The donation consists of 25 of the artist’s portfolios of graphic works, from Color Message (1985) up to Green Self Models from 2022. The format of the portfolios ranges from exclusive and elegant boxes, and wavy plastic folders, to covers made of a variety of paper qualities. The gift to the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design is Carroll’s largest donation to a museum outside of the US. The artist has a strong relationship to Norway through several gallery exhibitions since the late 1990s.

“Printmaking is in its essence a meditation on repetition and variation, if allowed to be. This just keeps being true for me, and I also love the secondary aspects of portfolio building: the creation of the container for the project, the design of the colophon page, everything that surrounds the prints with a voice or personality,” says Dunham to curator Geir Haraldseth in the book Carroll Dunham. Prints 1985-2022, which is published alongside the exhibition.

The exhibition will be opened by Her Majesty Queen Sonja Thursday 2 February.