Carroll Dunham

Ok, so not all of the images were emerging artists.....Carroll Dunham has been around painting since the 70's but his career took off in the 80's.  I think that his work is seen in a lot of the fresh artists today.  His jarring images of phallic organisms with gritting teeth are sometimes jarring at first...but you can't see the detail that Dunham puts into his work.  He is a painter who chooses to paint comical, sometimes gross subject matter.  He is one to look up, especially if you like the contemporary successors. Here is a bit more of reading:

If there's a couillard painter in our time, it's Carroll Dunham. For the past twenty years, Dunham has fine-tuned a vocabulary of painting that pushes pigments' capacities to their material limits and reflects a world bursting with those convulsive, violent elements Cezanne was once so unpopular for alluding to. Dunham's work has at its core an innate predisposition toward Darwinian survival of the fittest, all the while abstaining from blatant cultural critique or heavy-handed political diatribe. The great-grandson and great-great-grandson of homeopathic physicians, Dunham presents us with images of growth and destruction in much the way a philosopher-scientist would-with an unabashed, if necessarily distanced, enthusiasm. It's as though Jacques Derrida's theory of Plato's Pharmakon-that a curative drug, depending on the amount administered, can function as easily as poison as remedy; and that in order to become immune to something deadly, one must ingest a bit of it-is the subtext for all of Dunham's work. In homeopathic tradition, Dunham uses culture's poisons as nearly lethal cures, injecting just enough of humankind's toxic characteristics-greed, hate, envy, relentless self-absorption-to act as an immune system against them. In each ascending manifestation, Dunham's inoculated mongrels grow increasingly resilient and evermore insatiable, a monstrous testament to the old adage what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  -johanna Burton, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Curatorial Fellow