At first glance, Marcel Dzama's delicate works strike one as being almost innocent, yet a grotesque and occasionally gruesome universe opens up behind this façade
Pbk, 8.25 x 10.5 in. / 184 pgs / 156 color. | 12/31/2012 | In stock $55.00
Fans of artist Marcel Dzama lined up on Saturday afternoon, March 5, to have the artist sign (and draw custom pictures in) advance copies of "Behind Every Curtain," a small, beautifully produced volume that feels as much like a mysterious sketchbook as an exhibition catalog. read the full post
Published by Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner. Text by Deborah Solomon.
Marcel Dzama first gained fame with his drawings, but has recently expanded his practice to encompass film and three-dimensional work, developing an immediately recognizable language that draws from a diverse range of references and influences, including Dada and Marcel Duchamp. Created in close collaboration with the artist, this publication includes work from his 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in London, which featured three videos inspired by the game of chess; puppets and masks based on the characters; and drawings, collages, dioramas, paintings and sculptural works. Dzama utilized the architecture of the gallery itself--an eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse--by hanging puppets from a skylight above the five-story building’s central spiral staircase and placing monitors in the windows so videos were viewed from the street. Among the drawings included is the large-scale, four-part Myth, Manifestos and Monsters, in which characters from the films line up alongside figures from the artist’s earlier repertoire. Other drawings, such as two large-scale works executed on piano scroll, depict the characters in poses that mirror their movements and dancing in the films, while a series of new collages feature this imagery in more unexpected contexts. Five small paintings depicting a lone female terrorist seated on a bed emphasize the underlying tension between reality and fiction that characterizes all of the works gathered here.
Marcel 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.
The protagonists in Dzama's charmingly but horrifically choreographed pictorial world, which appears to be devoted to the abysmal depths of humanity, are wearing masks, uniforms, bearing arms, dancing, making love, or in agony. Dzama’s uncanny dream world of the unconscious seldom develops a stringent narrative but creates a metaphorical landscape that invokes a whole range of associations and interpretations. In doing so, they absorb a wide spectrum of influences from older and more recent art history: Francisco de Goya, Dada, in particular Marcel Duchamp as well as Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. The pictorial aesthetics of the 1920s is typical of Dzama’s oeuvre, diversely augmented by references to literature, psychology, cinematic history, and current political issues.
PUBLISHER Kettler Verlag
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.25 x 10.5 in. / 184 pgs / 156 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 12/31/2012 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 106
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783862061013TRADE List Price: $55.00 CDN $72.50
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In 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.
PUBLISHER David Zwirner Books
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 6 x 7.75 in. / 80 pgs / 80 color / 25 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/31/2011 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2011 p. 176
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781935202622TRADE List Price: $22.00 CDN $30.50
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Published by Art Gallery of Windsor. Text by James Patten, Wayne Baerwaldt.
Over 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.
PUBLISHER Art Gallery of Windsor
BOOK FORMAT Flexi, 8.25 x 7 in. / 124 pgs / 100 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/31/2010 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 64
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780919837706TRADE List Price: $35.00 CDN $40.00
Marcel 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.
PUBLISHER DruckVerlag Kettler
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 9.25 x 12 in. / 152 pgs / illustrated throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/28/2010 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 46
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783941100886TRADE List Price: $79.95 CDN $95.00
Published by David Zwirner Books. Text by Cameron Shaw. Interview by Spike Jonze.
Published 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.
PUBLISHER David Zwirner Books
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.25 x 10.5 in. / 244 pgs / illustrated throughout / DVD (NTSC and PAL).
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 12/1/2008 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2009 p. 187
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783865217424TRADE List Price: $79.95 CDN $95.00
Published by David Zwirner Books. Essays by Jason Rosenfeld and Jason Tougaw.
Bats, 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.
PUBLISHER David Zwirner Books
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8 x 10 in. / 96 pgs / 50 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/1/2006 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2006 p. 119
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780976913610SDNR30 List Price: $70.00 CDN $85.00
Published by Walther König, Köln. Essay by Catrin Lorch.
Three 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.
PUBLISHER Walther König, Köln
BOOK FORMAT Clothbound, 9 x 12 in. / 56 pgs / 37 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 3/15/2005 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 134
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883758428SDNR30 List Price: $48.00 CDN $60.00
Marcel Dzama: The Never Known into the Forgotten
Marcel Dzama: Behind Every Curtain
Marcel Dzama: Drawings from the Bernardi Collection
Marcel Dzama: The Infidels
Marcel Dzama: Even the Ghost of the Past
Marcel Dzama: The Course of Human History Personified
Marcel Dzama: Paintings & Drawings