BIOGRAPHY

William Dunlap's art takes a highly contemporary view of the timeless American landscape. Using allegory, animism, and elements of language, headdresses the ever evolving American sensibility, its history, its light and its often troubled ground.

Dunlap is drawn to the pastoral and Gothic within the natural and historical landscape. Within this overarching theme, charged images merge to stir the memory and challenge stereotypical perceptions. Unashamedly narrative in process, revisionist in stance, and always informed by the history of Art, his work strikes a delicate balance between the lasting traditions of the nineteenth century American painting, and the vanguard principles of twentieth century Modernism. Hypothetical Realism, as he's apt to put it: the specific places his work evokes might not be real,---but then again, they could be.

Whether working oil on paper, polymer paint on canvas, or assembling found and fabricated objects, his art, for the most part, is hybrid. The dualism of painting and sculpture has intrigued him and informed his work from the very beginning. His Construction Series "combines elements of painting, sculpture and assemblage in such a way as to provoke connections and dialogue between our perceived historical past and the critical concerns of our current time and place," says Dunlap. Rembrandt in the Blue Ridge, 1994-95, echoes an earlier direction in Dunlap's work: the Old Masters Reconsidered Series, where passages from icons of western art mingle freely with autobiographical material and the American landscape. Here, a meticulously painted Rernbrandt "self-portrait" stands in front of the snowy Blue Ridge mountains, flanked by panels of irises, architectural elements, a conch shell and a life-size Walker hound.

Born January 21, 1944 in Webster County, Mississippi, Dunlap maintains studios in McLean, Virginia and New York City. He serves as visual arts commentator on WETA-TV's Around Town and frequently writes about art. Mr. Dunlap's work hangs in numerous museums and collections across the country, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art where his fourteen paneled, one-hundred and twelve feet long cycle of paintings, Panorama of the American Landscape, opened in the Rotunda Gallery in 1985. He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships which include The Danforth Award in the Visual Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation International Fellowship, a grant from The Warhol Foundation, and a residency in Bangkok, Thailand as a Lila
Wallace/Reader's Digest International Artists Fellow.