Carroll Dunham

Cartoonlike figures, imagined landscapes and unsettling encounters trace a painter’s movement between abstraction and recognizable forms. Carroll Dunham is on view December 1, 2026 through March 14, 2027 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in the Miami Design District. The artist’s first museum survey of paintings in more than 25 years brings together over 50 works dating from 1983 to the present. Drawing on postwar American painting and 1960s underground comics, Dunham explores sexuality, masculinity, violence and creative freedom through recurring characters and psychologically charged scenes. Early works feature organic shapes emerging from the grain of wooden panels. Later paintings develop these forms into creatures, crowded worlds and human figures, including the armed “shooter,” bathers and wrestlers. The exhibition follows these changing subjects through gardens, scenes of physical confrontation and recent paintings that consider the artist’s studio as a space for reflection. Organized by ICA Miami, the exhibition is curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Gean Moreno, with curatorial research by Donna Honarpisheh.