Kyle Dunn

Kyle Dunn was born in 1990 in Livonia, Michigan. He earned a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore in 2012, and in 2011 completed the Option SCIE program at the Haute Ecole d'art et de design de Geneve (HEAD) in Switzerland. He lives and works in Queens, New York.

Dunn builds his paintings up with sculptural relief, layering paint and material to give his figures and interiors physical depth. His subject matter centers on intimate, often nocturnal domestic scenes exploring queer desire, vulnerability, and the theatrical quality of private life. He held his first New York solo exhibitions at Sardine in 2017 and Thierry Goldberg Gallery in 2018. In 2013 he took part in an artist residency at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, hosted by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and in 2014 received a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.

His profile expanded through the 2020s. In 2022 his work appeared in Fire Figure Fantasy, a group exhibition drawn from the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami's own collection. In 2023 he presented Night Pictures, a solo exhibition of colorful nocturnal scenes at P·P·O·W in New York, the gallery that represents him. In the summer of 2024 the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut mounted Kyle Dunn / MATRIX 194, his first solo exhibition organized by a museum. In 2025 he opened Devil in the Daytime, his first solo exhibition with Vielmetter in Los Angeles, his second representing gallery.

Critical attention has focused on the hybrid nature of Dunn's work, paintings built up into relief so that they sit between painting and sculpture, and on his recurring subject: queer intimacy staged inside richly detailed domestic interiors. Art press coverage of his 2023 exhibition Night Pictures highlighted his radiantly colorful nocturnal scenes, and subsequent writing has described his interiors as symbol-rich and cinematic, dense with private meaning. His 2024 solo exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, an institutional debut, has been read as an early confirmation of museum-level interest in an artist still in the first decade of his exhibiting career.

Dunn's auction market is new and small. Phillips introduced him to the auction block in October 2022, and his auction high remains Vanity Never Ends, which sold for GBP 107,100 (about USD 118,808) at Phillips London on 13 October 2022, roughly five times its low estimate. Aggregated market data put his realized auction prices in a range of roughly USD 24,923 to USD 118,808, reflecting size and medium as much as any clear trend line. Phillips has since sold further examples in London and Hong Kong, the only auction house known to have brought his work to sale so far.

Dunn's market is genuinely early stage. His auction history began only in October 2022, the number of lots sold at auction remains small, and realized prices have varied by a factor of roughly five depending on the individual work, so any single result should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable benchmark. There is no catalogue raisonne, which puts weight on his two representing galleries, P·P·O·W and Vielmetter, as the primary channel for verification and access to new work. His growing footprint in museum and foundation collections, from the Dallas Museum of Art to the Sunpride Foundation in Hong Kong, is the clearest signal of institutional durability at this stage of his career.