Emerging from Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama’s quirky drawings of a cast of unlikely creatures, 1940s-style babes, cowboys, cigarette-smoking tree-men, bears and bunnies, have won him an international following. The ink drawings are stained with muted washes in grey and brown, the latter often derived from root beer, which lends these surfaces a faint, seductive scent and shimmer.

Untitled (#mdp023 – man with five heads) was included in the 1999 exhibition Marcel Dzama: more famous drawings, which was organized and toured by Plug In Gallery, Winnipeg, and curated by Wayne Baerwaldt. The work is typical of Dzama’s bizarre sensibility and deadpan humour, featuring jumps of scale, proliferation of heads and overall helplessness of a protagonist caught in an impossible situation. The piece depicts a man, dressed in a brown tunic and trousers; this man with an expressionless face has heads for hands and feet. Swaying slightly on his head-feet, the man’s legs are locked together; his arms are held out from his body, alarm showing on the face of one of the head-hands. Four miniature cowboys – clad in grey suits, black hats, and boleros – stand at the feet of the brown-suited figure. Three are poised to draw, while the cowboy on the far right points his gun upwards: they’ve got the five-headed man surrounded.