Carroll Dunham (born 1949) has been exploring the subject of the wrestler since the 1980s, making it an ideal motif for the artist to pivot around as he begins to shift away from his fabled nude-in-landscape paintings of the past decade. Wrestlers brings together four recent, interconnected bodies of work. These are the Wrestling Place series (depicting two Herculean figures tussling against a barren panorama); the Self-Examination paintings (featuring intimately folded bodies within tensely cropped picture planes); the Wrestler suite (portraits of men facing away from the viewer and exposing scuffed, bruised backs); and The Golden Age (scenes of wrestlers rendered in pencil on gessoed linen). Published in connection with an exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, this catalogue features a new essay by artist and writer Alexi Worth.
