[from the pressrelease]
30 years apart and both hailed as leading painters of their generations, Carroll Dunham and Michael Williams have been visiting each other’s studios and collecting each other’s drawings for years. Born out of their friendship and an ongoing dialogue in drawing — a medium at the core of both artists’ practices — Carroll Dunham | Michael Williams: Drawings is the first exhibition to present their work together. Curated by Cornelius Tittel, in close collaboration with the artists, the show brings together more than 50 drawings from the late eighties until today. Dunham has chosen examples from both an early phase he now calls “abstraction with a hard-on”, and more recent figurative drawings of “Bathers” and “Wrestlers”, while Williams has juxtaposed these with his technically complex “Puzzle” drawings, as well as a large group of absurdly comical, figurative drawings he often turns into large format inkjet paintings. By highlighting their shared inspirations — from Psychedelia to Underground comics in the style of Robert Crumb — and showing both artists’ development and stylistic diversity, the exhibition reveals, for the first time, the unique laboratory of ideas behind the subjects and techniques of two of America’s most challenging contemporary painters.