American artist Carroll Dunham (b. 1949, New Haven, Connecticut) is known for his highly distinctive style, with a practice encompassing painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Since the 1980s, Dunham’s work has undergone a series of interlinked compositional evolutions that have spanned from biomorphic abstraction to representation. For the past decade, Dunham has continually returned to the subject of the tree, resulting in a dynamic body of work that explores the formal potential that can reside within a single, fixed motif. Tree 2 (2018-2019) is part of the artist’s most recent series, in which he pushes representation one step further by imbuing trees with humanoid features. This painting debuted in a two-person exhibition with Albert Oehlen, Bäume/Trees, at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf in 2019.