Bather/Night

Carroll Dunham creates prints, drawings, and paintings featuring boldly graphic, often erotic cartoon-inspired imagery. His work appears at once sophisticated and childlike, refined and obscene. Bather/Night is part of a recent series that explores the somewhat well-worn art-historical theme of a woman in nature—a new subject for the artist. Specifically, this piece depicts a woman bathing, a theme that recalls classic depictions by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Pierre Bonnard. Shown in severe foreshortening, a female nude bends forward under a night sky inspired by the painter Vincent van Gogh, splashing herself with water as her geisha-style hair blends into the background. As Dunham explained, "It’s almost similar to the way you might simultaneously be having the most intimate look at someone’s body parts and out the other side of your eye you see a tree way off in the distance—that collision of subjects and that collision of space."