DZINE

Through an ongoing response to popular culture, post-conceptual methods, baroque elements, romanticism, craft-making and appropriation, Chicago-based artist Dzine has developed his own language that is finding its place in our contemporary art discourse. Dzine has created work that contextualizes... Read more

Through an ongoing response to popular culture, post-conceptual methods, baroque elements, romanticism, craft-making and appropriation, Chicago-based artist Dzine has developed his own language that is finding its place in our contemporary art discourse. Dzine has created work that contextualizes these diverse elements into a vernacular of contemporary aesthetics.

Often dissected and consistently engaging, his work addresses culture through a lens of spirituality, beauty, desire, faith, folklore, and identity. A mixture of sculpture, paintings, and installation, the works reside in an imaginative, kaleidoscopic, and meticulous world. The juxtaposition and combination of the studio paintings, the appropriated and original kustom kulture sculptures result in hybrid artifacts that are beautifully crafted, aggressive, thoughtful, sexual, and strangely seamless. Raw, fluid and sexually physical, the large-scale paintings consume our attention drawing us closer to their iconography. There is no casual gaze at these art works, as the visual excess repels and then pulls the viewer closer into the work. The artist seeks to change the rules concerning the final image by illuminating how the masculine can become delicate, how baroque can be minimal, and how rational can become emotional. The work is at once melancholic, excessive and exuberant poised somewhere between celebration and regret. The result proves to be universal and painstakingly honest.

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