The Consortium Museum presents a duo-exhibition by the artists Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons at the Consortium Museum from 25 October 2024. It will be on display until 23 March 2025.
Image above: Carroll Dunham, Qualiascope: Female Taken Alone, 2021; Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (Vienna)
The exhibition at the Consortium Museum offers the opportunity to see two important works that both artists have created over the last thirty years. Conceived as a “marriage” of two monographic exhibitions, it brings together some twenty works by Laurie Simmons (who has not had a solo exhibition in France for thirty years) and some twenty by Carroll Dunham (who benefits from exceptional loans: eight paintings from the entire Winners and Losers series from 2020, a monumental work on display at the Astrup Fernley Museet in Oslo).
The exhibition thus offers the opportunity to see their works together and discover possible connections. It is not a “game of seven wrongs”, nor is it about looking for examples of what the other has already done (“I always like to say that he copies me much more than I copy him,” says Simmons). Instead, the show invites the viewer to discover common concerns or forms in both works that have “grown together” – or not. “When you live so long and so closely with another artist, a kind of dialogue takes place. I’ve been aware almost since the beginning of our relationship that Laurie’s work has an influence on how I think about paintings.”
About the artists
Laurie Simmons is a photographer and filmmaker. Carroll Dunham is a painter. Born a few months apart in 1949, they are American. Established in the 1970s, their respective visual arts careers developed in the 1980s, each quickly attaining a significant place and stance in their discipline in the New York and international avant-garde scene.
Simmons chose photography at a time when the medium was considered less “noble” than painting or sculpture (“When I went to art school, photography wasn’t considered art,” she said), and became associated with the Pictures Generation in 1977. Dunham was among the artists in the 1980s who took a chance on a discipline that had become remarkably old-fashioned, if not reactionary, and envisioned a return to painting. They both challenge the historical canons and conventions of their discipline, and its evolution from consumer society to cancel culture.
Both began exhibiting their respective œuvres in the late 1970s in New York: in 1981, Simmons showed at Metro Pictures gallery, founded the preceding year, and Dunham at Artist Space. They met in 1977 and got married in 1983. Their bodies of work have been developing in tandem for forty years in their studios at their home in Connecticut. They had never before exhibited together. “[Laurie] has been making photographs and I’ve been making paintings, the ways in which our work can be talked about in relation to each other has been overlooked,” says Carroll Dunham.
Simmons’s photographic work is essentially peopled with figures, but she does not make portraits, and her “characters,” at a distance from reality, are mostly created from puppets, life-size dolls (Love Dolls), miniature toys, and more recently, entirely made with artificial intelligence.
Carroll Dunham’s pictorial work is also populated with characters. Not more of a portraitist, he cares little about conveying the inner life of his creatures, but is quite concerned with the geometric situations arising from anthropomorphic forms. Dunham recently found an effective way of keeping his characters at a distance from reality: they are now green, a strategy borrowed of course from science fiction comics (Hulk), thereby discouraging the now univocal reading of his earlier black or white characters as “racialized.”
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Friday, 25. October 2024 – Sunday, 23. March 2025
WHERE?
Consortium Museum
37 Rue de Longvic,
21000 Dijon
