Green Hills of Earth (3)

Carroll Dunham creates prints, drawings, and paintings featuring boldly graphic, often erotic cartoon-inspired imagery. In the triptych Green Hills of Earth, Dunham expands his decades-long renegotiation of historical representations of the nude in art, here, depicting a pair of male wrestlers stripped bare and entwined in combat Dunham’s wrestlers straddle the line between figuration and abstraction , and between the heroic and the abject, exhibiting exaggerated musculature and sexual features. The wrestlers’ hypermasculine modes of combat are at once demonstrations of technical prowess, relying on extreme athleticism, and indulgently base, verging on libidinal. Indeed, his characters perform the dualities embedded in the allegory of wrestling—the ongoing tug-of-war between good and evil. The formal and psychosexual dimensions of this physical entanglement become Dunham’s subject.