Installation view, Marcel Dzama: Who Loves the Sun, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Marcel Dzama: Who Loves the Sun
David Zwirner is pleased to present Who Loves the Sun, an exhibition of new work by Marcel Dzama (b. 1974), on view at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York. This will be the artist’s eleventh solo exhibition at David Zwirner since joining the gallery in 1998, and his first solo presentation in New York since 2014. The exhibition coincides with the opening of a major survey of the artist’s work at the Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland.
Dzama created this new group of drawings in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which the artist and much of the rest of the world were social distancing and in quarantine. A sense of hope pervades these new works. Several of the drawings feature beaming anthropomorphized suns and moons above groups of reveling masked dancers. As Dzama notes, “I find the fear, anxiety, and sadness from the virus has changed my art. It has focused it in a more hopeful and positive direction. I find when things are more easygoing, I get a little more cynical and world-weary, but when things are down, I find myself being more hopeful and positive in my work.”1
1 Marcel Dzama, quoted in Barry Samaha, “State of the Art Industry in the Time of Coronavirus,” Harper’s Bazaar (May 7, 2020), accessed online.
Image: Marcel Dzama, Who loves the sun, 2020-2021 (detail)
Who Loves the Sun features an array of new drawings that build upon Marcel Dzama’s interest in travel and nature. Many were inspired by photographs the artist took on trips to Morocco, Mexico, and Fire Island before the current COVID-19 pandemic.
“I find the fear, anxiety, and sadness from the virus has changed my art. It has focused it in a more hopeful and positive direction. I find when things are more easygoing, I get a little more cynical and world-weary, but when things are down, I find myself being more hopeful and positive in my work.”
—Marcel Dzama
Installation view, Marcel Dzama, No Less than Everything Comes Together, 2021. MTA New York City Transit and commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts & Design. Photo by Kris Graves
Installation view, Marcel Dzama, No Less than Everything Comes Together, 2021. MTA New York City Transit and commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts & Design. Photo by Kris Graves
Installation view, Marcel Dzama, No Less than Everything Comes Together, 2021. MTA New York City Transit and commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts & Design. Photo by Kris Graves
Installation view, Marcel Dzama, No Less than Everything Comes Together, 2021. MTA New York City Transit and commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts & Design. Photo by Kris Graves
Installation view, Marcel Dzama, No Less than Everything Comes Together, 2021. MTA New York City Transit and commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts & Design. Photo by Kris Graves
Installation view, Marcel Dzama, No Less than Everything Comes Together, 2021. MTA New York City Transit and commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts & Design. Photo by Kris Graves
Installation view, Marcel Dzama, No Less than Everything Comes Together, 2021. MTA New York City Transit and commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Arts & Design. Photo by Kris Graves
The exhibition includes the original drawings Dzama created for a mosaic commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts & Design for a subway station in Brooklyn, New York.
The drawings and corresponding murals feature theatrical scenes of masked dancing figures whose attire recalls Dzama’s costumes for his 2016 collaboration with New York City Ballet, the avant-garde costumes of Oskar Schlemmer’s iconic Triadic Ballet (1922), and Francis Picabia’s signature polka dots.
Several of the drawings depict an anthropomorphized moon that directly recalls the moon in French filmmaker Georges Méliès’s seminal early film A Trip to the Moon (1902).
Still from Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), 1902. Directed by Georges Méliès. © Star Film
Across these works, leaping and pirouetting dancers commingle with depictions of the sun and moon derived from imagery Dzama found in fourteenth-century manuscripts on alchemy.
Drawing from snapshots taken during his travels, Dzama mixes tropical imagery, depictions of leisure, and bright colors with illustrations of masked characters, dancers, wild animals, and hybrid figures in fantastical scenes of enchanted worlds that evoke wanderlust and joy.
Dzama created this twenty-five-foot-long mural in response to President Joe Biden’s victory in the state of Georgia in the 2020 United States presidential election.
The six-part work on paper debuted at Dzama’s solo exhibition An End to the End Times at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art in February 2021.
Marcel Dzama, We dance like the fire on the bones of the liars and let truth rise from the ash (or Moon dance), 2021 (detail)
Marcel Dzama, We dance like the fire on the bones of the liars and let truth rise from the ash (or Moon dance), 2021 (detail)
Marcel Dzama, We dance like the fire on the bones of the liars and let truth rise from the ash (or Moon dance), 2021 (detail)
Dzama works on Like the flowers of romance (2021), a portrayal of his wife and fellow artist Shelley Dick.
In contrast to the more optimistic works, a series of drawings offers foreboding views of ecological disaster including a large-format diptych that personifies Mother Nature as both a sinking oil ship and a figure that lies dead at the bottom of the sea.
Installation view, Marcel Dzama: Who Loves the Sun, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
Marcel Dzama at work on I’m glad mama fought, I only wish she won, 2021
“Whatever effect art has on a culture, I hope that whatever minuscule amount this could help might steer the pendulum toward good.”
—Marcel Dzama
Installation view, Marcel Dzama: Who Loves the Sun, David Zwirner, New York, 2021
“Dzama is a draftsman who is keenly aware that space represents the potential for bodies to touch. So as his landscape changed once again in 2020, so did this latest phase of drawings. Many of his crowds have once again emptied out and been replaced with oceans and moons, scenes from Dzama’s memories of travels he could no longer take. Sometimes he drew them from vacation photos of Morocco and Mexico.”
—Rachel Corbett, in Marcel Dzama: Tonight We Dance, the catalogue for Dzama’s upcoming exhibition at the Sara Hildén Art Museum, opening September 25, 2021
Who Loves the Sun is a new zine designed by Marcel Dzama on the occasion of his solo exhibition in New York. The zine features details from an array of new drawings featured in the show, which expand on Dzama’s interest in travel and nature.
Join us for a zine signing with the artist on Thursday, October 14, from 5–7 PM. Learn more and RSVP here.
Inquire about Works by Marcel Dzama