Marcel Dzama: Puppets, Pawns, and Prophets

Marcel Dzama took over an eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse and filled it with a chess game played by masked dancers, and Puppets, Pawns, and Prophets is the record of what that looked like from inside the building.

Published in 2013 by David Zwirner with Hatje Cantz and made in close collaboration with the artist, the 184-page hardcover carries 154 colour reproductions across a nine-and-a-quarter by eleven inch page, designed by David Chickey with a text by Deborah Solomon. It documents the London exhibition in which Dzama hung puppets from the skylight above the central spiral staircase and set video monitors into the street-facing windows so the films could be watched from the pavement, alongside the drawings, collages, dioramas, paintings, masks and sculptures that surrounded them.

Dzama (b. 1974, Winnipeg) works in New York, and his ink-and-watercolour vocabulary of polka-dotted figures, bat-headed dancers and armed women has extended into film, costume and stage design, including a ballet with Justin Peck for New York City Ballet. Related publications include the Abrams monograph Sower of Discord and Crossing the Line with David Zwirner Books.