Carroll Dunham has painted unsexy penises and labia—and nipples that look like pencil erasers—for years, and his subjects are hardly a privileged class of protagonists. Beginning in 2008 with his Bathers series and continuing to his most recent body of work, Qualiascopes (2021), the protagonists in his paintings are, as he says, “pre or post-technological.” Their origin lies outside contemporary culture: they are either thousands of years old, or dropped from outer space, or perhaps teleported from an ancient future. Buck naked, human-ish, with male and female anatomy, they are bathing, hunting, frolicking, and fighting within forests, pools, and deserted landscapes. And yet, for all his critics’ obsession with pornography, there is one thing his figures have never done until now: have sex.
With his new series, Qualiascopes, Dunham has invented a narrative conceit that isolates his protagonists. The seven paintings and nineteen drawings in this exhibition show these figures—in multiple shades of Kryptonite green—centered within drawn and painted frames. This intentional isolation is reinforced by the works’ titles, such as Qualiascope: Female & Male Captured Together, implying imprisonment and observation. Four of the paintings, Qualiascope: Coitus Diagrams (one, two, and three) and Qualiascope: Box of Light, show the green figures mating.
