Drawings by Marcel Dzama: From the Bernardi Collection Book

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.