Stray Dogs
Danijel Zezelj, Artist-in-Residence

Celebrating the 50th Artist-in-Residence

The Gardner Museum presents an exhibition of drawings by Croatian-born artist Danijel Zezelj, from his graphic novel Stray Dogs, which he started while in residency at the museum in the spring of 2004. Stray Dogs takes form as the memoir of a woman journalist. Part illustrated biography, part dreamlike musing, Zezelj’s richly descriptive narrative-in-drawings is told through a visually eclectic mix of individuals and settings, from moody cityscapes to shadowed interiors. His story takes on themes of exile, solitude, illness, displacement, and growing old in America. Merging a quasi-documentary style with darkly poetic and musical sensibilities, Stray Dogs explores the meaning of place in human experience. Zezelj’s project is a boldly impressionistic representation of the world as he sees it.

In the introduction to Danijel Zezelj’s first graphic novel, Il Ritmo del Cuore (Rhythm of the Heart, 1993), director Frederico Fellini wrote “I am fascinated by Zezelj’s threatening and ghostly perspectives, the way he manages to use his stories and figures to express a sense of melancholy, of some impending doom.” Zezelj’s 28th graphic novel, Stray Dogs, was published in conjunction with the exhibition.

Inspired by Isabella Stewart Gardner's patronage of living artists the Artist-in-Residence program invites artists, composers, writers and others to live, explore and respond to the museum's collection and archives. Zezelj is the 50th Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum.

From the time of Danijel Zezelj’s first residency through the present, the Gardner’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, by the Barbara Lee Program Fund, The Ford Foundation, The Wallace Foundation, the Thomas Anthony Pappas Charitable Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts