In 'Wild Kindness,' Marcel Dzama Dreams Up Worlds of Uncanny Whimsy — Colossal

Whether working in acrylic and ink on paper or carving small wooden sculptures, Marcel Dzama uses performance as an ordering tool. Raised in Winnipeg before relocating to Brooklyn, the artist is known for imagining whimsical worlds that appear to emerge from a strange, even unsettling dream.

“My drawings were very minimal in Canada, and when I first moved to New York, they became very dense with a lot of characters. They were very claustrophobic, and to put some order to the chaos of those drawings, I started putting the characters into dance positions,” he said in a 2022 interview.

In his latest exhibition titled Wild Kindness at Tim Van Laere Gallery, Dzama expands on this organizing principle of performance with dozens of paintings, sculptures, costumes, and films. Showcasing his distinct style of surrealism with unnerving undertones, the works feature many of the artist’s recurring motifs, including masked figures, moons with wry smiles, and anthropomorphized chess pieces—these are both true to scale in some sculptures and standing to heights that rival a half-grown child in others.

Tropical, oceanic settings ground many of the recent paintings with rising tides encroaching on the subjects. “A Song for Nature’s Queen,” for example, depicts a disguised woman serenading another surrounded by a menagerie of bright red birds and cats, all submerged in a shallow pool.

Similarly in “Bright starry eyes & bright starry skies,” a troupe of dancers clad in gold polka-dotted bodysuits wade through water, their eyes casting uncanny reflections on the surface below.

Dzama wields an unparalleled visual vocabulary that reaches across eras, geographies, and cultures. In Wild Kindness alone, his references include but are in no way limited to Federico Garciá Lorca’s surrealist play Trip to the Moon, the cosmos, ballet, kitsch portraiture, artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francisco de Goya, and a 1998 album by the indie rock band Silver Jews, from which the exhibition draws its name. Such wide-ranging influences mirror the visual density of the works, which plunge viewers into the artist’s richly layered universe.

Wild Kindness continues through May 11 in Antwerp. Dzama also has works on view through June 9 in Kleinburg, Ontario, for his solo show Ghosts of Canoe Lake at McMichael Canadian Art Collection. Find more on Instagram.

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