The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) has announced the first major museum survey of paintings by Carroll Dunham in more than 25 years. Opening on 1 December 2026 during Miami Art Week, the exhibition will bring together over 50 works spanning four decades, offering a comprehensive look at one of the most distinctive and influential voices in contemporary American painting.
Curated by Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami’s Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, and Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center, the exhibition traces Dunham’s artistic evolution from his early abstract paintings of the 1980s through to recent works produced in his studio today.
For more than fifty years, Dunham has developed a visual language that moves between abstraction and figuration, drawing on sources as varied as post-war American painting, underground comics, landscape, sexuality and popular culture. His psychologically charged works have become instantly recognisable for their biomorphic forms, cartoon-like figures and explorations of desire, violence and creativity.
“For decades, Carroll Dunham’s preoccupation with form has served as a powerful allegory for the psychological dimensions of everyday life,”
said Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami’s Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director.
“As the first career-spanning showcase of his work in the U.S. in over 25 years, the exhibition continues ICA Miami’s commitment to contributing new perspectives on understudied aspects of influential practices like Dunham’s.”
The survey follows both thematic and chronological threads. Early works reveal Dunham’s fascination with abstraction, where strange forms emerge from the grain of wooden panels, before evolving into increasingly complex landscapes and invented worlds populated by enigmatic figures.
A key section examines the artist’s shift towards figuration during the 1990s, including the emergence of his recurring “shooter” character — a provocative figure whose exaggerated anatomy and weaponry explore the fraught relationship between masculinity, power and violence in American culture.
The exhibition also considers Dunham’s later bodies of work, from idyllic scenes populated by bathers and references to Edenic landscapes to the physically charged “Wrestlers” series, in which themes of eroticism, conflict, and bodily struggle come to the fore.
Several recent paintings will be exhibited alongside historic works, highlighting the continued vitality of Dunham’s practice and his ongoing exploration of new painterly possibilities.
“We have long been fascinated by the myriad ways Carroll Dunham’s iconic work has shaped, and been informed by, contemporary visual culture,”
said Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center.
“This presentation was a unique opportunity to unite various threads of Dunham’s artistic practice, bringing together both early works and works that have not yet been shown in a museum context to reveal the boundless nature of the artist’s ongoing inquiries into form.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring newly commissioned essays by Megan Kincaid, John C. Welchman and Gean Moreno, alongside an interview with Alex Gartenfeld.
As Miami Art Week continues to expand its institutional offering alongside the city’s fairs and private collections, ICA Miami’s survey promises to provide one of the season’s most significant museum presentations, reintroducing audiences to the rich, inventive and psychologically complex world of Carroll Dunham.
Carroll Dunham, opening 1st December 2026, ICA Miami
