Marcel Dzama, Some of the Many Friends of Jason including Marcel, from the Estate of Jason Polan, 2019

Marcel Dzama

Some of the Many Friends of Jason including Marcel, from the Estate of Jason Polan, 2019

Mixed media collage with ink, watercolor and graphite on colored paper

Signed and inscribed for Jason P, Marcel Dzama and dated Sept. 2019

Unique

8 3/4 × 6 inches

Unframed

Signed and inscribed for Jason P, Marcel Dzama and dated Sept. 2019
This unique mixed media collage with ink, watercolor and graphite on colored paper was created by Marcel Dzama as a gift to late beloved artist Jason Polan. (more on Polan later).
Despite passing away from cancer in 2020 at only thirty-seven, Polan's impact on the contemporary art world, especially the vibrant milieu of post-millennial New York City, was profound. Unassuming, Polan's work immortalized humanity's quirks and nuances, capturing the essence of subway riders, diners, and museum visitors alike.

Provenance
Estate of Jason Polan

Marcel Dzama Biography:
Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama (b. 1974) has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. Drawing equally from folk vernacular as from art-historical and contemporary influences, Dzama’s work visualizes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales.
Dzama was born in Winnipeg, Canada, where he received his BFA in 1997 from the University of Manitoba. Since 1998, his work has been represented by David Zwirner. The artist has had fourteen solo exhibitions with the gallery, including Puppets, Pawns, and Prophets which was his first presentation at the London location in 2013 and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by Hatje Cantz, with an essay by Deborah Solomon. In 2014, David Zwirner presented a solo exhibition of Dzama’s work at the gallery in New York, which marked the United States debut of his film Une danse des bouffons (A jester’s dance). In 2016, the gallery held two exhibitions in New York and London dedicated to the collaborative works by Dzama and Raymond Pettibon. Crossing the Line, which marked the artist’s first solo presentation in Greater China, was on view at the Hong Kong gallery in 2019. In 2020, David Zwirner Online presented Pink Moon, an online exhibition of Dzama’s work, and in July of the same year, Blue Moon of Morocco was featured at the gallery's Paris location. In 2021, Marcel Dzama: Who Loves the Sun was presented at the gallery’s 69th Street location in New York and in 2022, David Zwirner, London, presented Marcel Dzama: Child of Midnight.
Dzama has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. In 2022, a solo presentation of the artist's work, Marcel Dzama: Viviendo en el limbo y soñando con el paraíso was on view at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Mexico. Marcel Dzama: An End to the End Times was on view in 2021 at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia. Also in 2021, the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland presented an exhibition of the artist’s work entitled Marcel Dzama: Tonight We Dance. In November 2023, Dzama presented To Live on the Moon (For Lorca) a film and performance commissioned by Performa as part of Performa Biennial 2023.
In 2018, the exhibition Ya es hora was presented at Galería Helga de Alvear in Madrid and A Jester’s Dance was shown at University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2017, La Casa Encendida in Madrid exhibited Drawing on a Revolution. In 2015, the artist’s film Une danse des bouffons (or A jester’s dance) was presented alongside related two- and three-dimensional work at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis. In 2010, a major survey of the artist's work was held at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Other solo exhibitions include those organized by Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2014); Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid (2013); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Mexico; World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum, St. Louis (all 2012); Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (both 2011); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2008); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (2006); and Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France (2005).
In 2021, MTA Arts & Design unveiled a commissioned mosaic by the artist, No Less Than Everything Comes Together, that is permanently on view at the Bedford Avenue Station in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2016, the artist created the costume and stage design for New York City Ballet’s The Most Incredible Thing, a performance based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Coinciding with the performance, Dzama also created an installation in the Promenade of the David H. Koch Theater as part of the New York City Ballet Art Series, titled The tension around which history is built.
Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Dallas Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Dzama lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
-Courtesy David Zwirner

More about Jason Polan:
Below is an excerpt from the 2020 obituary in the New York Times:
"Jason Polan, an incessant sketcher whose eclectic drawings and art projects — one was called “The Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art Book” — made him one of the quirkiest and most prolific denizens of the New York art scene, died on Monday in New York. He was 37. Mr. Polan’s signature project for the last decade or so was “Every Person in New York,” in which he set himself the admittedly impossible task of drawing everyone in New York City. He kept a robust blog of those sketches, and by the time he published a book of that title in 2015 — which he envisioned as Vol. 1 — he had drawn more than 30,000 people. These were not sit-for-a-portrait-style drawings. They were quick sketches of people who often didn’t know they were being sketched, done on the fly, with delightfully unfinished results, as Mr. Polan wrote in the book’s introduction. “If they are moving fast, the drawing is often very simple,” he wrote. “If they move or get up from a pose, I cannot cheat at all by filling in a leg that had been folded or an arm pointing. This is why some of the people in the drawings might have an extra arm or leg — it had moved while I was drawing them. I think, hope, this makes the drawings better.” Mr. Polan’s other creations included the Taco Bell Drawing Club, a loose group that initially consisted of anyone who joined Mr. Polan, who lived in Manhattan, at a Taco Bell outlet off Union Square and drew something. As the group expanded, any Taco Bell would do for club gatherings. “If I am out of town,” he told The New York Times in 2014, “I will try to have meetings wherever I am. Luckily, there are a lot of Taco Bells.” Mr. Polan’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries. “Polan has managed to strike a curious balance between the fleeting and the iconic, the famous and the pedestrian, the glitzy and the mundane,” Dave Delcambre wrote in Indy Weekly, reviewing a 2009 exhibition at the Lump gallery in Raleigh, N.C. “His most significant accomplishment is that he has taken seemingly random things from everyday life, internalized them and made them into something highly personal.”...Mr. Polan moved to New York after graduating. He was a particular fan of the Museum of Modern Art and, he said, came up with the idea of drawing every piece of art a museumgoer might see in hopes that the effort might somehow get him a job there. It didn’t, but his self-published book of the drawings earned a following.
Mr. Polan’s work also appeared in numerous publications, including The Times. For some months he drew a series for the paper’s Opinionator blog that was titled simply “Things I Saw” — a seam ripper in a tailor’s shop, four boxes piled on Wooster Street in Manhattan, an ear of corn in a Michigan cornfield.In 2011 he had his first solo show in New York, at the Nicholas Robinson Gallery in Chelsea. It included a Ping-Pong table on which he had drawn animals. “Also in the show, until the end of June, is Mr. Polan himself,” Roberta Smith wrote in her review in The Times, “working at a big table stacked with books and magazines that provide source material — existing images being another subject. He is adding drawings — and also small clay sculptures — to the show as they are made and is available for Ping-Pong or conversation. Relational aesthetics, if you want to call it that, has rarely seemed more charming, direct and user friendly.” For the “Every Person in New York” project, Mr. Polan would sometimes post his itinerary for people who might want to be sketched. (“I will be on the corner of 14th Street and 8th Avenue on the northeast corner of the street from 2:42-2:44 p.m. this Thursday wearing a bright yellow jacket and navy rubber boots.”) He also invited interested subjects to email him with a location where they intended to remain stationary for two minutes.Plenty of others, though, were unaware that they were being drawn. “At its heart, Jason’s ‘Every Person in New York’ project was an exercise in optimism and inclusivity,” Jen Bekman, founder of the online gallery 20x200, which represented him, said by email. “It suggested that he could capture everyone, and he pursued that goal earnestly and indefatigably for many, many years. He had a sharp eye for celebrities, and a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of who’s who in every social sphere imaginable, but he also made celebrities out of everyday people with a few deft strokes of his Uni-ball pen.”.."