The New York-based artist Marcel Dzama (*1974 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) has achieved international prominence with his subtly colored fantastic figurations in ink and watercolor. He is currently one of the most important artists of his generation working figuratively.

With The Never Known into the Forgotten, the Kunstverein Braunschweig is presenting Dzama in his first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Besides a large selection of collages and works in ink, the show includes sculptures, dioramas, and films.

At first glance, his delicate works strike one as being almost innocent, yet a grotesque and occasionally gruesome universe opens up behind this façade: the protagonists in his 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.

Dzama’s elaborate dioramas – stage-like showcases – are also populated by bizarre, hybrid beings from mythology, history, and legend. On the Banks of the Red River (2008) consists of nearly 300 ceramic sculptures before a pitch-black backdrop: aristocratic hunters point rifles at various creatures; dead animals, fantasy beings, and enormous heads are already lying lifeless on the ground. Dzama then presents a hodgepodge of chalk-white masks, animals, and heads in display cases, much like those in a museum setting, which in this con-text seem to be booty seized during a brutal campaign through foreign worlds.

The themes of war and terrorist stereotypes are always conspicuously prominent: in Dzama’s film The Infidels they are wearing uniforms, holding a Kalashnikov, hiding their faces behind hoods or balaclavas, and lining up in droves for battle, ultimately congregating to perform a kind of ghost parade. War is not mystified in the apocalyptic scenarios but is accepted as a universally valid historical phenomenon and presented as a phantasmagorical outcome in an alarming myriad of forms.

Dzama’s most recent film, A Game of Chess (2011), is being shown in the hall of Villa Salve Hospes. The aesthetics are reminiscent of experimental Surrealist film and seem to make reference to Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet. Both uncanny yet charming, the protagonists wearing geometrical costumes conquer the space dancing to threatening music. Their martial actions are alienated and tell a metaphorical tale of the dark driving forces of the cultures.

Marcel Dzama’s work has been presented in international solo exhibitions, for example at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada (2010), and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland (2006). A catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition, which includes contributions by Katrin Meder and Hilke Wagner, will be published at the end of the year.

Download floor plan (german)

The exhibition is being supported by:
Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur
Veolia Environnement
Volkswagen Financial Services AG
the Embassy of Canada