Afterlife B belongs to a body of work Dunham made in 2006 in which cartoon like forms push against and through solid architectural masses. Here, a wedge-shaped arrow drives into the edge of a flat brown rectangle, the impact rendered with the deadpan economy of a diagram and the presence of a painting that knows it is large. The work sits squarely in the lineage Dunham himself has inhabited: the mark-making consciousness of Guston, the material restlessness of Rauschenberg, and a strain of American comic absurdism that refuses to be decorative. Characteristically, the painting is dated by the artist as part of what he describes as the unconscious rhythm of the touch, time inscribed into the surface as both record and relic. Dunham's practice has been the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and a drawing retrospective currently touring from the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is among the most rigorously considered in American painting of the past four decades.