| | | |
|  Featured image is a sketch for A Game of Chess, a film by Marcel Dzama. It is reproduced from Behind Every Curtain, a small, beautifully produced volume that feels as much like a mysterious sketchbook as an exhibition catalog, though it collects drawings, film stills, sculptural works and dioramas produced in conjunction with the film and its exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. | |
| Published by KettlerMarcel Dzama’s 2011 films A Game of Chess and Death Disco Dance revealed fascinating new developments in the artist’s iconography and range of media--perhaps most notably in his use of puppets and dioramas, which added more playful qualities to his imagery of conflict and terror, and underscored his dialogue with modernist artists such as Duchamp, Man Ray and Oskar Schlemmer. This volume, published for Dzama’s exhibitions at Sies + Höke and Kunstverein Braunschweig, reproduces a wealth of new work, including images, stage sets, puppets, dioramas and sculptures from the films; a suite of ten drawings called Forgotten Terrorists (2008–2011), that draw on a photograph of the Palestinian terrorist and hijacker Leila Khaled; and other recent drawings, such as “Pepper Spray Saturday” (2011), an interpretation of the already iconic image of policeman John Pike pepper spraying Occupy protesters at University of California Davis.
|  | free shipping
UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S. FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS |
| Published by David ZwirnerIn recent years, Marcel Dzama (born 1974) has expanded his widely acclaimed drawing practice to incorporate theatrical realizations of his magical, myth-laden cosmology in three-dimensional dioramas and films. Behind Every Curtain provides a kind of sketchbook companion or dossier on the making of his latest film, A Game of Chess. This work draws on the importance of chess for the early twentieth-century avant-garde (Man Ray, Duchamp, Picabia) and the game's curious overlap with dance, in films and ballets by René Clair and--of especial significance for Dzama--Oskar Schlemmer, whose 1922 Triadic Balletincluded puppet-like masked figures performing on a checkered surface. In Dzama's film, characters based on chess pieces, clad in costumes made from papier-mâché, plaster and fiberglass and wearing elaborate masks, dance across a checkered board to engage their opponents in fatal skirmishes. Distinctions between reality and fiction collapse as both costumed and “real-life” characters in the film are killed. The filming and the creation of the costumes for A Game of Chess were carried out in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the influence of local crafts and religious traditions can also be felt throughout this body of work. Published on the occasion of Dzama's sixth solo exhibition at David Zwirner, this charming and affordable artist's book is packed with full-bleed drawings, sculptures, dioramas and film and production stills that give vivid testimony to the craft and thoroughness of his immensely popular art.
|  | free shipping
UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S. FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS |
| Text by James Patten, Wayne Baerwaldt.
Published by Art Gallery of WindsorOver the past few years Marcel Dzama's drawings of odd mutant figures have propelled him to bona fide art stardom. Executed with guileless simplicity and infused with a radiant innocence and an idiosyncratic sense of humor far removed from other strategies that have fueled artmaking over the past decade, Dzama's work is part of a new sensibility among artists born in the mid-1970s, that mingles the influence of Henry Darger, cartoon strips and a dark surrealistic streak. This concise and affordable survey examines the evolution of Dzama's singular approach to drawing between the key years of 1996 and 2001, using works held in the Bernardi Collection. In an accompanying essay, James Patten links Dzama to Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on grotesque humor and the carnivalesque, showing how each drawing contains an amalgam of allusions to twentieth-century popular culture.
|  | STATUS: Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory. |
| Published by DruckVerlag KettlerMarcel Dzama (born 1974) is one of contemporary art's hottest stars, and The Infidels is the most beautifully produced and substantial monograph on his work to date. Housed in a beige cloth cover featuring a tipped-in image, The Infidels contains fantastically sharp reproductions of paintings, drawings, film storyboards, collages and dioramas from the past two years, and installation shots from Dzama's exhibition of these works at Sies + Höke Gallery in Düsseldorf. The book also records an increased politicization in the artist's concerns,with references to American history and current events erupting in evocations of torture, terrorism and warfare (a partial result of Dzama's relocation from Winnipeg to New York). One special highlight of The Infidels is a new series of dioramas, housed in wooden boxes and vitrines,which transports Dzama's world of knife-wielding ghouls,mutant animal men and hooded, gun-toting girls into a three-dimensional wunderkammer, with figurines made of plaster, little cages with white cubes (a homage to Duchamp's "Why Not Sneeze?" assemblage), inscriptions and even taxidermied mice and birds, all recruited into the enacting of historical and mythic scenarios. These magical dioramas prove that the borders of Dzama's fantasy land continue to expand and find new forms and stages for their expression.
|  | free shipping
UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S. FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS |
| Text by Cameron Shaw. Interview by Spike Jonze.
Published by David ZwirnerPublished on the occasion of his fifth solo exhibition at David Zwirner gallery in New York, Even the Ghost of the Past presents new work by the influential young Canadian artist Marcel Dzama--including a DVD of original short films. A favorite among the art, literary and indie music scenes, Dzama is best known for his figurative compositions of pen and watercolor on manila-colored paper. Bearing a characteristic palette of muted browns, greys, greens and reds, Dzama's drawings are populated by an expansive cast of human, animal and hybrid characters. In recent years, Dzama has extended his practice to include work in multiple media. A recent exhibition, for example, transformed the gallery into an odeum of imagination, replete with drawings, sculptures, dioramas and films. Featuring an interview with the artist by filmmaker Spike Jonze and designed in collaboration with the artist as two hardback books twin-bound into one with a custom drawing on the cover, Even the Ghost of the Past is destined to become an instant collector's item.
Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. A co-founder of the Winnipeg-based Royal Art Lodge collective, he currently lives in New York City.
|  | STATUS: Out of Print | 12/1/2010
For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists > |
| Essays by Jason Rosenfeld and Jason Tougaw.
Published by David ZwirnerBats, nurses, Marlene Dietrich, a malevolent figure in a bear suit, two cowboys playing king-of-the-mountain on a rosebush, a group of men placidly eating babies at a makeshift picnic table, while, above them, a tree grows more babies: Marcel Dzama is back. As readers will learn in The Course of Human History Personified, he's a sleepwalker, a sleepdrawer--"I draw during the day, but the ideas come at night." Dzama records his visions in a bedside-table notebook. The finished work, in ink and watercolor, in a limited color scheme, against empty backgrounds, stripped of narrative context, offers many possible interpretations. Its cast of characters is expansive and in each drawing their roles become more complex and defined. Dzama's artistic influences include Blake, Goya, Botticelli and James Ensor and his sources encompass native mythology, Inuit art, Dante's Divine Comedy, medieval paintings and American folklore. The title, The Course of Human History Personified, is borrowed from Dante and recalls the grand artistic and literary cycles of the nineteenth century such as Thomas Cole's 1836 The Course of Empire, where nature plays as large a role as humans. Here nature is personified--imagined characters and trees and beasts assume base human characteristics. If it's a dark view of the world, it's also an entrancing one.
|  | STATUS: Out of print | 8/1/2007
For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists > |
| Essay by Catrin Lorch.
Published by Walther König, KölnThree people, a deer, and a bear share a boat on choppy seas; a woman has shot a frog while another frog looks on with trepidation; two masked people, also with guns, look on in shock. And all of this occurs in the first two paintings presented here, with Marcel Dzama's other new (2003-2004) works. Dzama's works, with their lucid pen and watercolor figures, inhabit a lovely place between Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd.
|  | STATUS: Out of print | 11/15/2006
For assistance locating a copy, please see our list of recommended out of print specialists > |
| |
| |
