M A R C E L D Z A M A .
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Biography
Marcel Dzama was born in 1974. He attended the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg,
Canada, where he still lives and works. He helped found the Royal Art Lodge, an artist collective that has
met weekly since 1996 to create puppets, videos, dolls, musical performances, costumes, and drawings.
In 2000, Dzama was presented with the New Artist Award by Art Cologne.
In 2003, Dzama collaborated with They Might Be Giants on a collection of stories and songs called,
Bed, Bed, Bed. Dzama has had several solo exhibitions in New York, at the David Zwirner Gallery,
and in Los Angeles, at the Richard Heller Gallery. His work has also been shown internationally, most
recently in Berlin, Cologne, Geneva, Venice, and Dusseldorf. Dzama's drawings have been featured in
Harper's, Saturday Night, and The Globe and Mail. He has recently begun painting larger works, and has upcoming shows in Dusseldorf, Stockholm, and London.
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Books
Marcel Dzama: Paintings and Drawings (Verlog Dr Buchhandlung Walter Konig, March 2005)
Drawings of Marcel Dzama: From the Bernardi Collection by James Patten (Art Gallery of Windsor, February 2005)
Bed, Bed, Bed, with They Might Be Giants (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust Dictionary of Received Ideas, text by Wayne Baerwaldt (Joseph R. Wolin & Lytle Shaw, 2003)
The Berlin Years, introductions by Sarah Vowell and Viggo Mortensen (McSweeney's, 2003)
Illustrator, The Broken Record Techniques by Lee Henderson (Penguin Books Canada, 2002)
Illustrator, Exit Strategy by Douglas Rushkoff (Soft Skull Press, 2002)
Expect: Art (The What to Expect Foundation, 2002)
Drawings for Dante (Timothy Taylor Gallery, 2002)
Songbook, text by Nick Hornby (McSweeney's, 2002)
Fantasy Underfoot (Corcoran Biennal, 2002)
Illustrator, The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman (McSweeney's Books, 2001)
Padova, Italy, Perugi Artecontemporanea, text by Guido Bartonelli (The Royal Art Lodge, 2001)
In Fumo, text by Giacinto Di Peitrantonio (Galleria of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2001)
W5: Five Winnipeg Artists Spanning Five Generations, essay by Chris Reid (Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, 2001)
Amused (Carrie Secrist Gallery, 2001)
The Royal Art Lodge, text by Guido Bartorelli (Perugi Artcontemporanea, 2001)
More Famous Drawings (Plug In Editions, 1999)
Sit(E)ings: Trajectories for a Future, text by Shirley Madill, Serena Keshavjee, Cliff Eyland, Rafael G. Moriana, Vera Lemecha, and Libby Cardinelle (Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1999)
Famous Drawings Present: Marcel Dzama, Wayne Baerwaldt (Smart Art Press, 1998)
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Awards
Viewers Choice Award, 2004
Finalist, The Sobey Art Award, 2004
Best Album Design, illustrations, with Mike Carroll, for The Weakerthans package, Second Annual Western Canadian Music Awards
Nominated for Best Costume Design, with Drue Langlois, for Film (Dzama), by Deco Dawson, Manitoba Motion Picture Industry Association
Film (Dzama) by Deco Dawson, Winner of the NFB Best Short Film Award, 2001 Toronto International Film Awards
New Artist Award, Art Cologne, 2000
Watercolor Award (for achievement in painting), University of Manitoba, 1997
Namta Award (for achievement in painting), University of Manitoba, 1996
Indiflix Award (fifth place in independent filmmaking competition), 1996
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Media Projects
Indiflix, Cinameteque Theater, Winnipeg 1996
Red River, Cinameteque Theater, Winnipeg 1996
Slideshow, Ace Art Gallery, Winnipeg 1996
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Press and Interviews
August 2003
Border Crossings
The BearFacts (Record in progress)
"That initial interest, combined with the bear encounter
of a close kind, led to The Berlin Years, a beautifully produced
portfolio that includes reproductions of 32 drawings, as well as a
facsimile version of one of Dzama's notebooks. The reproductions are so good that if it weren't for the lack of root beer lingering in the air (Dzama uses diluted root beer syrup as ink), you would be hard-pressed to tell the portfolio drawings from their real sources."
August 2003
Border Crossings
Winnipeg on the Hudson
By James Trainor
"As openings go, it was a successful if somewhat industrious one. On a particularly bitter January evening at The Drawing Center in New York, the current members of the Royal Art Lodge managed to destroy a suitcase-load of their own drawings, collaborative works on paper deemed just too awful to be allowed continued existence in the world."
July 2003
Newsweek
Interview: The Strange, Prescient Art of Marcel Dzama
By Stephen Elliott
"I make art primarily for myself and to show my friends, so I guess it's important to make art that they can connect to. I think the nostalgic feel adds an interesting element, it makes them seem somewhat familiar even though that style isn't that prominent currently. "
April 2003
The Berlin Years (McSweeney's)
Interview: Sarah Vowell Questions Marcel Dzama About Canada
and Colour
By Sarah Vowell
"I like and am inspired by Dada, Fluxus, and de Stijl. But I'm just not sure if the comparison quite befits the Royal Art Lodge—mainly because somehow we seem so much more lowbrow and unsophisticated than any of them. We are definitely a tight knit group of friends whose form of social interaction is largely art-making. We don't have an agenda per se, but somehow drawing with other people is so much more fun than doing it by yourself."
April 2003
The Brooklyn Rail
Art Seen: The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust
By Jennifer Coates
"The Royal Art Lodge taps into shared anxieties and childhood histories, mindful of their internal mechanisms and impelled by a need for what former member Adrian Williams called 'primitive togetherness.' Their work emits a warm glow of creative collaboration and offers proof of poetry amongst the detritus of home, existential angst amongst boxes of snack food, dirty socks, and action figures."
March 2003
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
The Power of the Playful
By Sarah Milroy
"The Lodge's drawings and collages are woven from these sorts of finely crafted miniature observations, startling us with intimate little epiphanies of recognition or pure pleasure—like their gorgeous little watercolour of a baby sitting upright in his washtub, attended by a scarlet songbird (which came first in the creative process, one wonders, the baby or the bathtub?), or a little girl who inflates giant seed pods shaped like Japanese lanterns, setting them free to float across a brilliant yellow sky, or the tender stag (rendered in the softest of brown watercolour strokes) who holds a mouse gingerly by the tail and carries a saffron-yellow cat on its back. (The inscription: 'At the end of the day, the deer takes everybody home.') Heavenly."
March 2003
Maclean's
A Happy, Talented Collective
By Amy Cameron
"In mid-1996, a group of University of Manitoba fine arts students started meeting every Wednesday in their shared studio. Together they worked on drawings as well as paintings, videos, collages, fanzines, masks, costumes, dioramas, kites and even puppets. The Royal Art Lodge was born."
March 2003
Winnipeg Sun (Manitoba)
Winnipeg Artist Scores Another Cup
By John Kendle
"...Dzama, at just 28, has quickly become one of our
hottest visual artists."
January 22, 2003
London Free Press
Art Darlings All for One
By CP
"Their studio, a drab, one-storey brick building plunked down on the fringe of Winnipeg's warehouse district, is a mess, admits Marcel Dzama, the de facto leader of the Royal Art Lodge, a troupe of six young artists well established as the darlings of Canadian contemporary art."
January 2003
National Post (Toronto)
Art Group Leaves New York in the Dust: Winnipeg's Royal Art Lodge
scores a coup in Big Apple
By Sarah Lazarovic
"The group's first collective show in New York is a coup, to say the least."
June 2002
Edmonton Journal (Alberta)
Marcel Dzama Follows Accidental Path to Artistic Success
By Gilbert Bouchard
"Known for his creation of a vaguely nostalgic, surreal artistic universe, the soft-spoken artist populates his tight artistic world with anthropomorphic animals, spandex-clad vintage superheros, old-style film cowboys, ray-gun-toting, pulp fiction space-men and the '20s-style flappers."
February 2002
The Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan)
A Young Artist Who Is Just Like a Drawing Machine
By Jack Anderson
"Riffing visually and conceptually off of the soft and gentle drawings of cherubic children and anthropomorphized animals found in moralistic children's books, the boldly outlined illustrations of comic books that depict powerful dual-identitied superheroes, and even cheesy 1950's sci-fi movie stills, where middle America is terrorized by actors in cheap monster costumes, Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama darkly subverts our nostalgias by trolling through what are ostensibly the benign iconographies of our childhoods."
June 2001
Canadian Art
Looking at Dzama
By Eileen Sommerman
"When I look at Marcel Dzama's drawings I might find his fluid and simple line to be a sign of directness and honesty, his wispy gestures a sign of levity and a sense of humour."
2001
ARTFORUM
Top Ten
By Marcel Dzama
"Marcel Dzama is a Winnipeg-based artist whose work can currently be seen at the Carrara Academy, Bergamo, Italy. McSweeney's Books will publish an edition of his paintings and drawings in 2002."
October 2000
The Vancouver Province (British Columbia)
Drawing on Whimsy: Marcel Dzama unleashes his free-floating
imagination in a new show
By Michael Scott
"That offhand gesture says a lot about Dzama's attitude toward his art. The young man is on a steep trajectory toward success—exhibited at international art fairs, represented by one of New York's most progressive dealers, David Zwirner (who also represents Stan Douglas), and now the subject of a flattering solo show at the Belkin, a first-rate gallery by any standard."
October 2000
The Gazette (Montreal)
Odd Menagerie of Archetypes: Marcel Dzama's realm is filled with
morphing people, beasts and machines
By Henry Lehmann
"Marcel Dzama, a 26-year-old shooting star from Winnipeg, has touched down in Montreal at the Saidye Bronfman Centre's Liane and Danny Taran Gallery, where he has unleashed his amazing miniature-animal act."
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Additional Links
David Zwirner Gallery
Richard Heller Gallery
Timothy Taylor Gallery
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