Canadian Artist: (1945- )

Steve Rockwell was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1945 and lived in the outskirt town of Espoo until the age of five. Arriving in Gothenburg, Sweden with his family and eventually settling in the town of Grangesberg, his father here having found his lifelong vocation as a miner, which continued with the family’s move to Canada in 1957. Moves from one mining town of Northern Ontario to another, furnished a rugged natural backdrop to the artist’s life and imagination growing up, one that Canada’s Group of Seven artists had so richly exploited. 

The first formal art training for Rockwell came through artist and teacher Peter Kolisnyk’s summer classes conducted in Elliot Lake, Ontario, and Rockwell’s two years at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. By 1970, the artist had been the co-producer of an art house showing of television commercials premiered at Toronto’s Cinema Lumiere. He joined an artist studio at 567 Queen Street West, taking part in three group “Workscene” exhibitions, as they were dubbed by studio member Jim Tiley. The work tackled minimalist, pop, and conceptual art trends, but in an ironic twist, one of its paintings titled “IT’S ALL OVER” signalled the artist’s 1972 exit from the art scene.

Although Rockwell had resumed his craft privately by 1979, his official return was marked by the 1989 solo exhibition at the Arnold Gottlieb Gallery in Toronto. It was only after this hiatus of 17 years that the present persona of Steve Rockwell emerged. To family and close friends, however, he answers to Jouko Salomaa, his legal Finnish identity. A pivotal 1987 work, “Pick a Number between 1 and 99,” explored the relationship between the public and private, artist and non-artist. That same year, the floor sculpture “Gallery Space” elicited the participation of 64 art galleries in Toronto, and become the vehicle of its own exhibition. Another work, “Color Match Game” pitted two players in an “aesthetic combat,” generating the raw data for making art in the process. Since 1999, “Color Match” tournaments have been played across North America. 

With the publication of the 1996 book work “Meditations on Space, An Artist’s Odyssey through Art Galleries in Europe and North America,” Rockwell’s interest in the gallery as subject was made international. The notated visits to seven art galleries in Zurich, Switzerland; one in Aix-en-Provence, France; twenty-six in Paris; forty-four in New York City; sixty-eight in Los Angeles, CA; and thirty in Toronto, garnered an introduction and base for the founding of dArt International magazine in January, 1989. The 2021 release of a signed, limited edition of dArt was an acknowledgement of the publication’s roots in art making. The mining of dArt content as creative potential continues for Rockwell in his work.

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Canadian Artist; RCA (1940-2007)

Kenneth (Ken) Edison Danby (6 March 1940 – 23 September 2007) was born on March 6, 1940 in Sault Ste. Marie, and was destined for a career as an artist. As a 12 year old, he was already talking to career advisors about how to enrol in the Ontario College of Art (Now OCADU). In 1958, he realized this dream by enrolling at the school, but became disenfranchised with institutional education and quit two years later. Beginning first as a young artist in Toronto exploring abstract art like many other contemporaries, it was not until a trip to Buffalo, New York in 1962 to visit the Albright-Knox Gallery and take in a solo exhibition of American realist, Andrew Wyeth, that the course of his artistic career would be changed. Paul Duval has noted that, inspired by Wyeth, “the impact made by these paintings convinced Danby that he should forsake abstract painting, which he was increasingly becoming dissatisfied with and return completely to his devotion to realism.”

In 1964 Gallery Moos organized “Danby’s first one-man show, which promptly sold out and set an example that was repeated and surpassed over many years”*. Today, Danby is recognized internationally and is one of Canada’s best known artists. His work can be found in private, corporate and public institutions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Danby received many awards and accolades, including his election to membership of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1976. He was also awarded with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal by the Government of Canada, and The Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada. Danby served on many boards, including that of the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.

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Hungarian-Canadian-American Artist; (1979-        )

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Canadian-American Artist; (1974-        )

 Marcel Dzama was born 1974 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He currently lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, in particular his ink and watercolor drawings.

Dzama works extensively in sculpture, painting, collage, and film. The artist is also known for his intricate dioramas and large scale polyptychs that draw from his talents across a range of media. Dzama works in multiple disciplines to bring his cast of human figures, animals, and imaginary hybrids to life, and has developed an international reputation and followingfor his art that depicts fanciful, anachronistic worlds. The artist is also known for his work with The Royal Art Lodge. Dzama’s first book “Drawings from the Bernardi Collection” helped launch his career which gave him his first museum show at The Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario in 2003. 

Dzama’s work has been used on the covers of numerous record albums, notably The Else by They Might Be Giants, Guero by Beck and Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans. His costume designs can be seen in music videos for the Bob Dylan song, “When the Deal Goes Down,” the N.A.S.A. song, “The People Tree,” and the Department of Eagles song, “No One Does It Like You” which he also co-directed. McSweeney’s has published two collections of his work, The Berlin Years in 2003 (reprinted in 2006) and a follow-up, The Berliner Ensemble Thanks You All, in 2008. In 2010, composer Ed Bennett created “Dzama Stories,” a piece of music inspired by Marcel Dzama, featuring Decibel and Paul Dunmall. It is music for amplified ensemble, electronics and improviser.

Dzama has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2010) and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2008). In 2006, he had an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, which traveled to the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland.

Marcel Dzama cites Marcel Duchamp as one of his greatest inspirations and has drawn on the artist’s near-obsession with chess as a starting point for his video A Game of Chess, 2011, in which life-size Kings, Queens, Rooks and pawns duel for supremacy in a production brought to life in Guadalajara, Mexico. The film is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Over the past decade, his work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); Moby Dick at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Sobey Art Award Short List at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2009); Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities at The Museum of Modern Art New York (2008); In Me / Out of Me at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2007). In 2006, he was included in the Whitney Biennial exhibition, Down By Law: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In the late 1990s, Dzama participated in the group exhibitions Greetings from Winnipeg at the Minneapolis Co;;age of Art & Design, Minneapolis and Contemporary American Realist Drawings, the Jalane and Richard Davidson Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago (both 1999). In May 2016 at the Labs Gallery in Bologna was presented an exhibition of his works entitled “Masked Tales”, in which also exposed an Italian artist Vanni Cuoghi.

Dzama’s work is in the collections of major museums and public institutions, including the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island. Collectors of his work include Spike Jonze, Francios Pinault, Bennett Miller, Kevin Hearn, Don and Mera Rubell, Brad Pitt, Roy Bernardi, Jim Carrey, Leonard Nimoy, Viggo Mortensen, Gus Van Sant, and Steve Martin.

AVAILABLE WORKS