Marcel Dzama
The gallery will open on December 12th with two concurrent solo exhibitions by Marcel Dzama and Jockum Nordström. This will be Canadian artist Marcel Dzama's third solo show at the gallery. A solo exhibition called More Famous Drawings traveled throughout Canada and Japan in 2002- 2003. Dzama (born 1975) is also part of the Winnipeg-based artists' collective The Royal Art Lodge, an exhibition of which opened earlier this year at the Drawing Center in New York, and then traveled throughout the United States and Europe. The artist's work was also included in many international group shows this year.
Dzama is known for his figurative compositions of pen and watercolor on manila-colored paper, with their characteristic palette of muted browns, grays, greens, yellows, and reds. His 14x11-inch drawings are populated by human characters, animals, hybrids---sometimes combined with text--- that are placed against bare backgrounds. Caught in unlikely situations, his characters and their environments are stripped of narrative contexts and offer many possibilities for interpretation. Despite this absence of narrative, Dzama's cast of characters is expansive and many characters reappear, creating 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".