Marcel Dzama: Drawings from the Bernardi Collection

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.