MARCEL DZAMA

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Seen individually Marcel Dzama’s small and delicate drawings, hand-tinted with watercolor and root beer, have an eccentric aesthetic sensibility. The compositions of cartoon-ish creatures combine references that are at once intellectually highbrow and reminiscent of retro pop culture from the Roaring Twenties and the Fifties.

 

Papering the walls of the gallery with these drawings, the resulting installa- tions are a barrage of disconnected and darkly humorous images linked by their psychological tension. The myriad images create the effect of a multi- channel visual binge. Dzama continues a trajectory in contemporary drawing that could, for example, include Kippenberger’s “Hotel Drawings”, and the work of Raymond Pettibon.

 

Dzama is the founder of the collaborative group The Royal Art Lodge, which, had an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among many other international venues. Dzama also plays in the band Albatrose Note.

 

Dzama’s cast of characters is expansive and many characters reappear, cre- ating various threads in the many different compositions. As the artist himself said: “There is a narrative, but it’s so muddled that it’s like an inside joke that has gone too far.”

 

Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada. Dzama now lives and works in New York City. Since gradutation in 1997, Dzama has had numerous critically acclaimed solo shows in New York, London, Paris, Barcelona, Stock- holm and Los Angeles, Dusseldorf, and Milan. He had an exhibition in New York at the David Zwirner Gallery in September of 2005. Marcel did the cover artowrk for Beck’s 2005 crititcally acclaimed album Guero.