William Dunlap

American, 1944

William Dunlap is one of the most important and celebrated painters in Southern art today. His mixed-media canvases, constructions, installations and works on paper are what he calls “Excavations” of Southern culture, literature and landscape. They are a rich vernacular for what it means to live in “The American South”. His Delta landscapes are often inhabited by Walker Hounds, Antebellum homes, cooling towers and other reminders of industrial and agricultural incursion into the landscape. Numbers and words seep up from this ground into the air like the humidity in a Southern sky. Dunlap’s work fuses the sublime into a rich pageantry of what has come before, what is now and what will be in a gumbo-like stew of Southern narrative. Says the artist of his work – tongue in cheek, “I call what I do hypothetical realism, these places, situations and events I paint are not real but they could be.” Dunlap’s art can be found in numerous public and private collections across the country including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Mississippi Museum of Art and the Arkansas Arts Center.

Courtesy of Greg Thompson Fine Art