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Dunham's work often critically examines gender stereotypes and performance. His paintings of male wrestlers engaged in acts of domination and submission were recently on view at Gladstone Gallery in New York. This suite is the first time that Dunham has depicted male and female figures together. The "gaze" is a metaphor for  normative power dynamics and scrutinizes  the way they are represented in visual culture. Each of the eight images is a variation on the same picture which becomes the armature on top of which Dunham constructs and re-constructs this perennial story.

The cliché verre technique dates to the 1850s and starts with a sheet of glass covered with candle soot, through which the artist draws revealing the clear glass beneath. This is then treated like a photographic negative, from which prints are made. While technically photographic, Dunham considers this project part of his extensive exploration of approaches to printmaking since the mid-1980s. Dunham drew on the glass plates with pencils, nails, styluses, rags and sandpaper, likening the feeling of making marks on the soot-covered plates to “drawing in air with light.” The apparent repetitiveness of the imagery is belied by the variety of effects the process affords, and the photographic nature of the end result places the images “in”, as opposed to “on”, the paper, in a manner that is quite unusual in the context of more conventional printmaking.

Dunham came to prominence as an artist in the 1980s when a new generation returned to painting. He is considered by many to be one of the most important painters of his generation. Dunham’s rigorous exploration of the structure of painting effortlessly moves back and forth between figuration and abstraction. In his work this can often make the subject matter seem secondary to how the picture is constructed and calls attention to the subjective nature of looking.

Curator Johanna Burton wrote “Dunham’s paintings are the products of an ongoing shamanistic brew: one part art history, one part Punch and Judy, one part hallucinogen, and two parts time clocked on the analyst’s couch.”

Dunham's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO (2014); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2009); Millesgården, Stockholm, Sweden (2008); Drammens Museum, Drammen, Norway (2006); and a mid-career retrospective was held at the New Museum, New York, NY (2002). His work is represented in notable public collections including the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Saint Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO; Tate Gallery, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MI; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY among others.