BOSTON, MA.- Themes of displacement, solitude and exile are explored at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum this summer with Stray Dogs, a series of hauntingly dark, poetic visual narratives and illustrations by Croatian artist Danijel Zezelj. Zezelj’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Stray Dogs is comprised of 72 black and-white illustrations from a graphic novel of the same name.

Celebrating the Gardner Museum’s 50th Artist-in-Residence, the exhibition also marks a milestone in the history of the contemporary art program at the historic museum. Part illustrated biography, part dreamlike musing, Zezelj’s narrative-in drawings combine a visually eclectic mix of images – gloomy cityscapes, fragmented objects, displaced individuals and shadowed interiors, including the hallowed hallways, dark corners and ornate details of Isabella Gardner’s palace museum – to depict a boldly impressionist view of the world and explore the dark side of human experience. Stray Dogs is on view June 24 – August 21, 2005 in the first-floor Special Exhibition Gallery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

“Danijel Zezelj is comfortable in a Kafkaesque world,” says Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Gardner Museum. “His dark and haunting illustrations reflect his upbringing in a violent and tumultuous time, yet they speak in the language of cartooning where pictures act as words and communicate easily to the young and old. Stray Dogs is a form of poetry made visual. Well known as a graphic novelist in Europe and gaining notoriety in the United States, Danijel Zezelj has a singular style of cartooning and of telling stories.”

Merging a quasi-documentary style with poetic and musical sensibilities, Zezelj’s works convey a stoicism that permeates all corners of life – as described by renowned Italian film director Federico Fellini (who wrote the introduction to Zezelj’s first graphic novel in 1993, The Rhythm of the Heart): “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. He depicts all this with great talent and a style that succeeds in showing his world view with originality and coherence.”

A GRAPHIC NOVEL | STRAY DOGS - The novel itself, Stray Dogs (Charta/Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, June 2005; distributed by D.A.P.) is a story in eight chapters that takes the form of a personal memoir of a narrator, a woman journalist from New York City. The title, Stray Dogs, comes from the end of the last story. “‘Stray dogs’ could be anything, like stray thoughts or stray emotions,” says Zezelj. “…a metaphor for something lost and wandering.” In a series of short episodes or vignettes, drawn in Zezelj’s dark and fragmented style and mixing different, multi-layered elements, the novel tells a story of a young woman who is feeling lost and displaced as she dreams and investigates events around her. The novel is in eight chapters: Shop of Wild Dreams; Spaghetti; Picasso; Masters of Construction; Fish; Tuesday; Princess; and Dogs.