Carroll Dunham, photographed by Laurie Simmons.
Earlier this summer, Carroll Dunham and Chris Ofili bumped into each other in the foyer of the Whitney and found themselves in a conversation more intimate and generative than either expected. A few weeks later, they decided to pick up right where they left off, and were surprised anew to find there was still plenty left to discuss. For the last three years, Dunham has been imagining an artist who gets so fed up with his surroundings that he leaves Earth altogether. In his Studio on Another Planet series, a white male sculptor takes off for a distant colony populated by purple people, hoping that getting as far away as possible might help him start again. It’s a funny, fantastical premise, though one that’s not entirely removed from Dunham’s real life. After decades in New York, he moved his studio to Connecticut where the silence and solitude slowly began to creep into his work. Now, for the series’ third and final chapter on view at Matthew Brown in New York, Dunham’s warped little planet has become even more distorted. Below, he and Ofili pick up the thread of their conversation, trading stories about coming up in the art worlds of London and New York, the state of their studios, and how far one has to go to feel free.
TUESDAY 11 AM SEPTEMBER 7, 2026 NEW YORK CITY
CARROLL DUNHAM: Hi, Chris. Nice to hear your voice.
DUNHAM: Pretty good. I appreciate that you wanted to do this.
OFILI: Of course. The timing was sweet because it can be a continuation of where we left off in the foyer of the Whitney.
DUNHAM: I had the same thought. As I told you, I see your prints when I’m working at Two Palms, and I’ve seen the exhibitions you’ve had in New York over the last 10 years or more. It was nice to run into you again in person.
OFILI: It was. I was there with my daughter, and she told me that she started watching your daughter’s TV series [ Girls ].
DUNHAM: Lena was telling me that there’s a younger generation of probably mostly girls, but some boys who have rediscovered that show.
OFILI: Yeah. Amel’s 19 now, so maybe she’s the same age that Lena was when she wrote it.
DUNHAM: A tiny bit younger, but more or less. As we get older, it’s nice to think that young people are interested in what we’re doing.
OFILI: And also, younger people can grasp what we think are adult issues. Your daughter’s 40, mine’s 19, but I still see her as a very young person in the sense that the knowledge I feel that I haven’t given her, she’s gained through other sources.
Sharing Space (5) , 2025-2026. Acrylic and pencil on linen. 72 x 65 in, 182.9 x 165.1 cm.
DUNHAM: I understand what you mean. You realize at a certain point with kids that there are all these things you know from life experience that they have to learn themselves.
OFILI: Right. And I think that as artists and let’s say liberal thinkers, we think somehow that we’re closer to our kids and that they have to get it from us. But when I think back to when I was 19 in art college, I was in the world gathering thoughts and not at home asking if things were right and wrong.
DUNHAM: Did you know you were an artist when you were 19?
OFILI: I don’t think I knew what an artist was. I’d begun to study what an artist could be, and I realized that being an artist is about exploring who you can be rather than who you should be. Similar to you, I didn’t study art before I was 17. How did you start?
DUNHAM: I went to a small college, which had a studio art program, and one of the teachers organized a program where students went to New York and he found places for them to intern in artist studios and architects’ offices. During that time, I really got a sense of the art scene in New York. I didn’t know what else to do after school, so I moved there. For a while, I was really at a loss, but when I was 24 I tried to make paintings and one thing led to another.
OFILI: Were there other people around you making paintings?
Sharing Space (3) , 2025-2026. Acrylic and pencil on linen. 70 x 75 in, 177.8 x 190.5 cm.a
DUNHAM: Not really. I mean, the friends around me were. I was there for 10 years before anyone other than a few friends saw what I was doing. By that point, I had met a few other people who were painting, but it shocked me during the early or mid-80s when a lot of artists my age started to show their work in New York, and a lot of it was painting. I didn’t know there were all these people around doing it.
OFILI: Did it feel like you were working in isolation, or did the sense of a community not really exist?
DUNHAM: Somewhere in between. The art scene was so much smaller. I’m sure you had a similar experience in London watching the art scene blow up, and what it is today would’ve been completely unrecognizable and overwhelming. But I had a little community, and I was beginning to feel like I was part of something. I have a lot of nostalgia for that time, even though when you’re young, you’re lost and confused about whether what you’re doing is worth anything or not. But there was something very clear about it. The geography of the art landscape was very understandable. I don’t know what it’s like to be a young artist now, but it certainly would be difficult to have a sense of any kind of overview, which I felt I had. It was very chauvinistic. We thought that the New York art scene was the center of the art universe, which was naive and silly in hindsight, but at the time felt true.
OFILI: It was thriving though, surely. And that was the early ’80s.
DUNHAM: Yeah. I permanently moved to New York in 1973. I had jobs, but I made my work around that, and I gradually started to feel like I was on a path of some kind. By the early ’80s, I had a community of artists, and I was starting to have enough self-belief to invite people to my studio. Back then, everything was word of mouth.
OFILI: That would’ve been the time when [Gordon] Matta-Clark made his cuts into that now void of a building, when New York was a very different place and a very different atmosphere.
Finished , 2019-2025. Acrylic and pencil on linen. 102 x 144 in, 259.1 x 365.8 cm.
DUNHAM: Yes. I was aware of what he was doing, and I was really interested in it. There was a group of artists about 10 years older than I was who were all very important to my friends and me. Barry Le Va was one of them, Mel Bochner, and Matta-Clark. They weren’t all part of the same little scene exactly, but there was an adjacency to the conversation that was going on, and I would call those my formative years. I was overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Everything felt very spread out, and I didn’t know how to focus my thinking. There were a couple of painters whose work really fascinated me, like Robert Ryman. The idea that one could narrow one’s project down to this very circumscribed space and go as deep as possible really appealed to me. But most of the work that my friends and I were talking about was much more physical. So I decided to focus on painting as a way to save myself from feeling lost and distracted.
DUNHAM: I had an apartment that I tried to make a studio, but I didn’t know how and I was sharing the space. But I found a tenement apartment where I could take out a loan. It was four little rooms with a bathtub in the kitchen up six flights of stairs. But it was very suitable and kind of romantic. I used a couple of the rooms to work on my paintings and had a bedroom and a kitchen with a bathtub in it.
OFILI: It sounds adequate, right? If you could replicate that now.
DUNHAM: Well, I’m sitting in my studio, which has a big bathtub in it. So, I’ve sort of tried to return to some of the things about that time that were nice.
OFILI: Mm-hmm, that kind of self-contained feeling.
Sharing Space (6) , 2025-2026. Acrylic and pencil on linen. 75 x 65 in, 190.5 x 165.1 cm.
DUNHAM: Yeah. It felt good for me being there. It was the first time I’d really felt it was important for me to live alone. It was important for me to understand how to motivate oneself rather than being told what to do.
DUNHAM: Some of it’s very mundane, like how to organize your space. I learned a lot from working picture framing and graphic design jobs because physical infrastructure needs to be in place in order for anything to happen. People always comment that my studio is so tidy. That’s how I learned to organize the space around me. It’s very personal. I mean, I know very productive artists whose studios look like a bomb went off in them. That’s fine too.
OFILI: Over time I realized that I like the organization, but I also like that feeling that things are on top of each other a little bit, so the ideas flow into each other. I’ll hide paintings behind other paintings so that I’m surprised by them when I pull them out. These are just tricks that allow me to carry on.
DUNHAM: I’m sure. I have my own tricks just to keep something happening and my thoughts moving.
OFILI: When I say to keep things moving, it’s to diminish self-consciousness. I’m trying to do something that just feels like a natural adjustment.
DUNHAM: You mean that it’s part of an ongoing process?
OFILI: Yeah. It’s a breathing action, rather than resuscitation.
Sharing Space (4) , 2025-2026. Acrylic and pencil on linen. 60 x 74 in, 152.4 x 188 cm.
DUNHAM: That’s a great metaphor. I’m thinking about different scales and different types of spaces, whether they encourage different kinds of thought. My studio for 20 years has been up in the country in Connecticut. Working here full-time coincided with a shift in the subject matter of my paintings. People would say, “Oh, has working up in the country affected your work?” And I would always say, “No, absolutely not. It’s just me in a room, wherever the room is, it’s all the same.” 10 years on, I would look back and go, “Well, that was ridiculous.”
DUNHAM: Exactly. I’ve always maintained that there’s no viewer, only me, which is also completely absurd. I’ve been exhibiting my work for a long time, and I’m fortunate that other people look at it, but I have to tell myself that it’s me, myself, and I alone in a room in order to keep going. That’s probably my version of hiding paintings behind other paintings.
OFILI: It’s a critical one actually, because when we were at the Whitney, you told me that you’d moved out of New York. I thought, “That’s so interesting that Carroll’s moved out of New York, and he’s come into New York just to see shows.” I know that feeling of coming to New York to soak yourself in it, but I don’t know that feeling of squeezing the sponge out in New York and making things in New York. I know that feeling of squeezing that sponge out and making things elsewhere, and reflecting on the intensity of being in New York—that lifeblood, that strong heartbeat that it has, the ability to bump into another artist and immediately acknowledge that we can talk to each other about things. Most of the time we don’t see each other, we are in isolation and we have our own thoughts, but we belong to this global club where we can strike up conversation wherever we are. I did wonder why you moved. Is it in pursuit of freedom? Is it being tired of New York, the noise, the people?
DUNHAM: Honestly, my original reason for moving my studio was almost purely economical, but I look back now and there were a lot of different factors. I grew up in a place very much like where I live now and I couldn’t wait to get out of there when I was a young man, but there’s some circuit being closed. I was getting burned out by New York. All the things that make New York so exciting and stimulating were starting to feel exhausting and distracting. I was curious to see what it would be like to be the guy in the small rural town off by himself in his studio. I have assistants, but I’m alone in my studio. That’s how it’s always been.
OFILI: It’s interesting that you’re seeing it in some way as a return. And the question for me is, how far from yourself do you have to go to get that feeling of being free? It’s funny, it feels as though we’re still at the Whitney talking. We were in a big glass box, but we had tremendous intimacy in those times, in those 20 minutes.
Sharing Space (8) , 2025-2026. Acrylic and pencil on linen. 75 x 70 in, 190.5 x 177.8 cm.
OFILI: It was very strange because we were only talking about things that were local to us, how we felt, what the cycle is of being an artist. So, I’m trying to fast-forward now to your show. I was very struck when I got the images because the first thing I thought was, “This is Prometheus, or the artist, beginning again, sculpting humans out of basic clay forms and finding out that he himself is a human.” And then there’s this later image of the birds, representing Zeus, and the eagle, and the liver, and regrowth. There’s the artist in a simple studio, watching himself, making himself, and feeling self-conscious in that space. And then, there’s this journey of the artist moving out of the space and into the notes in the margin.
DUNHAM: It’s amazing to hear this from you because the work I’ve been making for the last three years has been generated by this very crude, simple fantasy, which is the idea that, if an artist couldn’t handle the culture they were operating in, what would they do? They would try to leave, and go someplace as far away as possible where they felt they could re-energize themselves. Since there’s really nowhere left to go on earth where that could be true, I had this fantasy of an artist emigrating to an earth colony, like another planet, and trying to work there. So, the white guy, the purple people, the curve of the horizon, the sense of being in space—all of that came out of this kind of ridiculous fantasy. It’s exactly what you’re talking about, this question of how far you have to go in order to find some way to operate freely as an artist. There is a long tradition of painters painting themselves or an artist in their studio, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to displace it from being an obvious autobiography. In the last year and a half, I’ve been making sculptures, and I liked the idea of making a sculptor the protagonist of the work. I have no intention of not working on paintings, but I needed to find another place to operate, and sculpture has been that for me. It’s just weird how everything is so interwoven, and how your work is leading you towards something that you weren’t consciously thinking about. As you know, it’s a very strange process to submit to.
OFILI: The key ingredient is time, and without that, we don’t get to play that game of deceiving ourselves that at some point you have to hurry up, press the panic button, and wrap it all up. When we move away, we take ourselves with us, fortunately in some ways, but unfortunately in others because we can be our own block. You can move to different studios, take your work, take your ideas, but ultimately, you’re trying to get that feeling of being home alone, like in the movie.
DUNHAM: When you moved to the West Indies, was that part of the motivation?
Sharing Space (7), 2025-2026. Acrylic and pencil on linen. 74 x 60 in, 188 x 152.4 cm.
OFILI: It was a conscious decision to decamp from a future that I could visualize. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like what I saw, it just felt like more effort to stay and live out the prophecy than to consider how different life could be if I wasn’t working with a preset pattern. It also allowed me to change my work.
DUNHAM: Up to that point, were you living in London and around a lot of other artists?
OFILI: I certainly was. London was really thriving. It was a place to be if you wanted to be an artist. It’s a big city, but it felt like a small community. Everyone knew each other, and there were lots of youngish artists coming up with ideas that felt fresh. It felt that I had something to offer that was different to others, and I liked that a lot.
DUNHAM: I think that’s the way your work was perceived, at least by other artists. Certainly, it was perceived that way in New York.
OFILI: I felt very encouraged when I showed in New York, where the conversation amongst artists was straight to the point; let’s talk about life, let’s talk about these things that we’re looking at. I didn’t get that feeling so much in London.
DUNHAM: I would love to have that feeling of bringing something new to a conversation. I never felt that when I had exhibitions in London. I never felt like I knew what I was penetrating. There might have been a lot of interest from other artists, but if there was, I didn’t hear about it.
OFILI: Yeah, that’s the difference between New York and London. One is used to new things coming in, and another one that truly sees itself as the center of the universe.
DUNHAM: Right, even if that’s delusional.
OFILI: I remember one thing, maybe just at the end of our discussion, but you spoke about being the oldest artist in a young gallery.
OFILI: That one stayed with me. That is a beautiful starting point, a kind of freshness.
DUNHAM: Well, I can tell you I’m having a lot more fun with these guys than I’ve had in a while. Even if it’s just wishful thinking, it feels good. It’s not unlike what you were describing about seeing your future and not being interested in living what’s mapped out already. That’s how I felt about my gallery situation in New York. Something needed to change for me. So, to be continued, I hope.
Source: Fashion
0 Comments