Böcker utgivna av David Zwirner

The quest for discovery through looking is the driving force of Bridget Riley’s work, as she has written: “More than anything else I want my paintings to exist on their own terms. That is to say they must stealthily engage and disarm you. There the paintings hang, deceptively simple—telling no tales as it were—resisting, in a well-behaved way, all attempts to be questioned, probed or stared at and then, for those with open eyes, serenely disclosing some intimations of the splendors to which pure sight alone has the key.” This publication unfolds along the lines of Riley’s 2018 exhibition at David Zwirner, London. Beginning with an exploration of black-and-white equilateral triangles, Riley leads the viewer into an awareness of the ways in which a surface—wall or canvas—can affect a seemingly simple form: the triangle. While she demonstrates these subtle changes, Riley manipulates this form by bending its sides. At first sight the viewer may experience this as a breaking apart, but as one continues to look, serpentine movements appear, or large shadowy triangles, which advance and recede. These paintings constantly reinvent themselves through looking. Riley is revisiting and developing works which she initiated over fifty years ago, as is shown here by the inclusion of Black to White Discs (1962/1965) in the exhibition. This diamond formation of discs, which graduates in tone from white to black and back again, offers a lead-in to her new body of work. In Cosmos and the Measure for Measure series, Riley recalls a group of subtly shaded colors used this time in discs. While the compositions remain fundamentally the same, the play of colors changes every time. The exhibition ends with a surprisingly spacious wall painting that offers the viewer many delights, not least among them a dance of fugitive white lights. Here, Riley disarms the viewer, encouraging us once again in an adventure of discovery. In his essay, Richard Shiff explores Riley’s ability to give new life to basic forms as she invites the audience, any audience, to help participate in the painting.

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, Duchamp’s Last Day offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours. Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work. Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades? A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, Duchamp’s Last Day is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

In 2017, Chris Ofili photographed chain-link fences throughout the island of Trinidad in order to explore notions of beauty, community, liberation, and constraint. This series of arresting images—“pocket photography,” as described by the artist—is the first body of photography ever published by Ofili. Through these entrancing black-and-white photographs, the artist engages with the diverse sources that inspired his critically acclaimed Paradise Lost exhibition at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017. Since moving to Trinidad in 2005, Ofili has continued to engage with the surrounding environment and culture, which has found its way into many of his colorful paintings. In these deceivingly simple black-and-white photographs, he captures a wide cross section of Trinidad as he highlights the encounter between natural and man-made settings, and the different aesthetic possibilities each brings out in the other. In focusing on a ubiquitous and seemingly unremarkable piece of equipment, Ofili is able to comment on our interactions with space and each other, using a near-universal subject as the fence slices the sky, melds into a tree, frames a basketball game, or reveals an opening. In a new essay by the critically acclaimed author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016), Joshua Jelly-Schapiro charts the history of chain-link fences; focusing on a selection of Ofili’s photographs, he then begins to explore what this imagery tells us about Trinidad in particular and the Caribbean as a whole. These two essays—one visual, the other literary—open onto a whole new set of interpretive possibilities for this groundbreaking artist.

Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist César Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts. On Aira’s dizzying and dazzling path, everything comes under question—from reproducibility of artworks to the value of the written word itself. In the end, Aira leaves us stranded on the bridge between writing and art that he set out to construct in the first place, flailing as we try to make sense of where we stand. Aira’s On Contemporary Art exemplifies what the ekphrasis series is dedicated to doing—exploring the space in which words give meaning to objects, and objects shape our words. Like the great writers Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch before him, Aira operates in the space between fiction and essay writing, art and analysis. Pursuing questions about reproducibility, art making, and limits of language, Aira’s unique voice adds new insights to the essential conversations that continue to inform our understanding of art.

The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. Known for his ability to recall classical painting, both through technical mastery and subject matter, Borremans’s depiction of the uncanny, the perhaps secret, the bizarre, often surprises, sometimes disturbs the viewer. In this series of work, children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work. Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness. In his accompanying essay, critic and curator Michael Bracewell takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium. He writes, “The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics—accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication is available in both English only and English and traditional Chinese editions.

Published on the occasion of the twenty-five year anniversary of David Zwirner, this book paints a picture of the gallery's growth and development through the lens of the artists that have shaped it. Since its founding in 1993, David Zwirner has above all else been guided by its artist-centric ethos. Beginning with the gallery's early days on Greens Street in SoHo, to its transition and expansion to Chelsea, London, the Upper East Side, and Hong Kong, this book captures David Zwirner's devotion to its inimitable roster of artists and estates. The heart of the publication is a wide-ranging, dynamic selection of the gallery's standout exhibitions-in many cases handpicked by David Zwirner himself. Many of these exhibitions highlight the countless works that ended up in major museum and private collections around the world. Also featured is an extensive gallery history that details all of the exhibitions by every artist and estate presented at David Zwirner, accompanied by archival imagery. With contributions by Richard Shiff and Robert Storr, as well as a foreword by David Zwirner, this publication offers rare insights into the growth of a commercial gallery through its long-term commitment to artists.

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political.Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist's career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017. The interplay with the specific architecture of the gallery and the way works are installed is highlighted throughout the catalogue, with images that explore the poetics of how space and work influence each other. Together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, the works on view challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself. Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his work, Gonzalez-Torres worked with familiar materials, from his iconic candy spill works and his evocative light string pieces, but also including mirrors, clocks, and curtains. His work activates the architecture of the various spaces, the physicality of the viewer, the past and present, continuously maintaining its relevance. Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece. New text by David Breslin explores the variety of works included here while contextualizing Gonzalez-Torres's contribution to art history.

Known for her extensive body of intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency.Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Josef Albers's legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground. Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist's work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper, and more. Together the body of work demonstrates the centrality of Asawa's innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the twentieth century. In addition to an incredible group of photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham, a selection of rare archival materials will illustrate a chronology of the artist's life and work. Featuring an extensive text by Tiffany Bell which explores the artist's influences, history, and, most importantly, the work itself, as well as a significant essay by Robert Storr discussing Asawa's work in relation to mid-twentieth century art history, culture, and scientific theory.

One of the most beloved painters of the twentieth century, Giorgio Morandi created works that continue to exert their mysterious power on viewers worldwide.

Fred Sandback: Vertical Constructions, published on the occasion of the Sandback show at David Zwirner in Fall 2016, takes its lead from a historic 1987 exhibition of Sandback¿s wor k in Münster, also called Vertical Constructions . With a mixture of rescanned archival imagery that shows the work in situ in Münster, and new photography of these lyrical works installed the Zwirner gallery, this new catalogue is both a historical documen t and the next step in this body of work, almost exactly three decades after its first presentation.

With a body of powerful paintings, dynamic installations, and hauntingly poetic video works, Oscar Murillo has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s leading voices. Published on the occasion of Murillo’s 2017 solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, this volume––the first dedicated overview of his astonishing career to date––presents the artist’s multifaceted practice from every angle. Born in Colombia, Murillo became widely recognized in his early twenties for his large-scale paintings that drew freely on both personal as well as art-historical references and influences. Since then, Murillo has been consistently interested in approaches to art making that are not rooted in the dominant Western value system, while remaining guided by his own aesthetic, rather than political messages or other, more reductive narratives. With numerous exhibitions at major museums and galleries, as well as ambitious projects at lesser-known exhibition spaces in Anyang (South Korea), Baku (Azerbaijan), Marrakech (Morocco), and Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), Murillo puts his politics of inclusivity to work without needing to make the work itself overtly political. In positioning himself between worlds—the art world, his family and community, peripheral spaces he seeks to inhabit—Murillo has made room for a new visual language, one that draws as easily and subversively on his personal narratives and the narratives around the places he has visited, as it does on traditional vocabularies of painting, installation, and sculpture. With an introduction by Okwui Enwezor and new scholarship by Anna Schneider and Emma Enderby, this publication offers critical insight into Murillo’s complex, vibrant body of work that continually offers enriching, powerful observations of the world around us.

Under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, Violet Paget (1856-1935) published a bewildering variety of work, including historical studies; meditative essays on art, music, gardens, and travel; philosophical dialogues; treatises on aesthetic theory and psychology; and supernatural tales. Born to a cosmopolitan English family, she settled in Florence, where she maintained friendships with artists and intellectuals throughout the world, including John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, J.A. Symonds, Walter Pater, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and G.B. Shaw. In close collaboration with her partner, the artist Kit Anstruther-Thompson, she was one of the first English thinkers to seriously engage with German empathy theory. Together, they tried to capture the mysterious and complex workings of art on our bodies, our minds, and our social lives; one of the fruits of this investigation was the 1912 volume Beauty and Ugliness, which included and analyzed long excerpts from Lee¿s own Gallery Diaries. Partially as a result of her strong pacifist politics and opposition to World War I, Lee became somewhat estranged from the literary establishment, although she continued to write prolifically until her death. Dylan Kenny is a writer and PhD student in Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-edited the exhibition catalogue Jason Rhoades: PeaRoeFoam (David Zwirner Books, 2015.)

"Criticism is our censorship . . ." So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote "Racontars de rapin" only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his contemporaries and predecessors, Gauguin unpacks what he viewed as the mistakes and misjudgments behind much of art criticism, revealing not only how wrong critics' interpretations have been, but also what it would mean to approach art properly-to really look.Long out of print, this new translation by Donatien Grau includes an introduction that situates the essay within Gauguin's written oeuvre, as well as explanatory notes. This text sheds light on Gauguin's conception of art-widely considered a predecessor to Duchamp-and engages with many issues still relevant today: history, novelty, criticism, and the market. His voice feels as fresh, lively, sharp in English now as it did in French over one hundred years ago. Through Gauguin's final piece of writing, we see the artist in the full throes of passion-for his work, for his art, for the art of others, and against anyone who would stand in his way. As the inaugural publication in David Zwirner Books's new ekphrasis reader series, Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter sets a perfect tone for the books to come. Poised between writing, art, and criticism, Gauguin brings together many different worlds, all of which should have a seat at the table during any meaningful discussion of art. With the express hope of encouraging open exchange between the world of writing and that of the visual arts, David Zwirner Books is proud to present this new edition of a lost masterpiece.

Summoning Pearl Harbor is a mesmerizing display of linguistic force that redefines remembering. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past? In this highly original meditation on the past, renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life. Beginning with the photo album of a former Japanese kamikaze pilot, which is reproduced in this volume, Nemerov transports the reader into a different world through his engagement with the photographs and the construction of a narrative around them. Through its lyrical prose, Summoning Pearl Harbor expands what we traditionally associate with ekphrastic writing. The kind of writing that can enliven a work of art is also the kind of writing that makes the past appear in vivid color and deep feeling. In the end, this timely piece of writing opens onto fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues to live in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Here, Nemerov’s constant awareness of the power of language to make an experience—seen or remembered—become real reminds us that great ekphrastic writing is at the heart of every effective description.

Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating Letters to a Young Painter, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his infamous Letters to a Young Poet, earlier correspondence from 1902 to 1908. While the latter has become a global phenomenon, with millions of copies sold in many different languages, the present volume has been largely overlooked. In these eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke describes the challenges he faced, while opening the door for the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Rilke’s constant warmth, his ability to sense in advance his correspondent’s difficulties and propose solutions to them, and his sensitivity as a person and an artist come across in these charming and honest letters. Writing during his aged years, this volume paints a picture of the venerable poet as he faced his mortality, through the perspective of hindsight, and continued to embrace his openness towards other creative individuals. With an introduction by Rachel Corbett, author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (2016), this book is a must-have for Rilke’s admirers, young and old, and all aspiring artists.

Since 2000, The Brooklyn Rail has been a platform for artists, academics, critics, poets, and writers in New York and abroad. The monthly journal’s continued appeal is due in large part to its diverse contributors, many of whom bring contrasting and often unexpected opinions to conversations about art and aesthetics. No other publication devotes as much space to the artist’s voice, allowing ideas to unfold and idiosyncrasies to emerge through open discussion. Since its inception, cofounder and artistic director Phong Bui and the Rail’s contributors have interviewed over four hundred artists for The Brooklyn Rail. This volume brings together for the first time a selection of sixty of the most influential and seminal interviews with artists ranging from Richard Serra and Brice Marden, to Alex Da Corte and House of Ladosha. While each interview is important in its own right, offering a perspective on the life and work of a specific artist, collectively they tell the story of a journal that has grown during one of the more diverse and surprising periods in visual art. There is no unified style or perspective; The Brooklyn Rail’s strength lies in its ability to include and champion difference. Selected and coedited by Jarrett Earnest, a frequent Rail contributor, with Lucas Zwirner, the book includes an introduction to the project by Phong Bui as well as many of the hand-drawn portraits he has made of those he has interviewed over the years. This combination of verbal and visual profiles offers a rare and personal insight into contemporary visual culture.

There are many myths about the artist Edgar Degas—from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant, to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire than Degas and His Model, a short memoir published by Alice Michel, who purportedly modeled for Degas. Never before translated into English, the text’s original publication in Mercure de France in 1919, shortly after the artist’s death, has been treated as an important account of the master sculptor at work. We know that Alice was writing under a pseudonym, but who the real person behind this account was remains a mystery—to this day nothing is known about her. Yet, the descriptions seem too accurate to be ignored, the anecdotes too spot-on to discount; even the dialogue captures the artist’s tone and mannerisms. What is found in these pages is at times a woman’s flirtatious recollection of a bizarre “artistic type” and at others a moving attempt to connect with a great, often tragic man. The descriptions are limpid, unburdened; the dialogue is lively and intimate, not unlike reading the very best kind of gossip, with world-historical significance. Here in these dusty studios, Degas is alive, running hands over clay, complaining about his eyes, denigrating the other artists around him, and whispering salaciously to his model. And during his mood swings, we see reflected the model’s innocence and confusion, her pain at being misunderstood and finally rejected. It is an intimate portrait of a moment in a great artist’s life, a sort of Bildungsroman in which his model (whoever she may be) does not emerge unscathed.

Michael Fried is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and luminaries of the art world have resulted in a canonized body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, Promesse du Bonheur. Fried’s passion, lyricism, and humor, which have been lauded by Allen Grossman and J. M. Coetzee, are on display as he explores the people and the objects that have moved him—great minds and great works of art. Along the way, Fried begins to reveal himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself; a young man, ambitious and in love; a committed champion of artists; a world-class intellectual among intellectual peers; and a poet, transmuting the world around him. Here we find the poet-critic at his most complete. Beyond presenting new works, Promesse du Bonheur breaks ground for Fried by combining the eighty poems—a mix of lyrical and prose poetry—with over thirty photographs, most of them made, all of them selected, by renowned American photographer James Welling. More often than not, the photographs stand in oblique relation to the poems, as complementary pieces of a mesmerizing whole. Written under the epigraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s urging in “Self-Reliance”—“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events”—the poems engage diverse subjects: from the high modernist art world of the 1960s to a major poet’s tragic loss of memory, from exemplary works such as Edgar Degas’s The Fallen Jockey, Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince of Homburg, and Adolf Menzel’s drawings, from the lives of figures such as Edouard Manet, Anna Akhmatova, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Ian Hamilton, and John Harbison, to erotic love, late fatherhood, the death of parents and friends, and the onset of age. Promesse du Bonheur is a uniquely vivid and compelling volume, at once a collection of wide-ranging yet intimately related poems and a brilliant photobook, that aims to hold the reader/viewer in its spell from first page to last.

Radical political shifts that raged throughout Cuba in the 1950s coincided with the development of Cuban geometric abstraction and, notably, the formation of Los Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters). The decade was marked by widespread turmoil and corruption following the 1952 military coup and by rising nationalist sentiments. At the same time, Havana was undergoing rapid urbanization and quickly becoming an international city. Against this vibrant backdrop, artists sought a new visual language in which art, specifically abstract art, could function as political and social practice. Concrete Cuba marks one of the first major presentations outside of Cuba to focus exclusively on the origins of concretism in the country. It includes important works from the late 1940s through the early 1960s by the twelve artists who were at different times associated with the short-lived group: Pedro Álvarez, Wifredo Arcay, Mario Carreño, Salvador Corratgé, Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, Alberto Menocal, José M. Mijares, Pedro de Oraá, José Ángel Rosabal, Loló Soldevilla, and Rafael Soriano. Many of the group’s members had traveled widely in the preceding years and corresponded with those at the forefront of European and South American abstract movements. Produced on the occasion of the major exhibition at David Zwirner, Concrete Cuba is the first in-depth catalogue on the subject to be published in English; the show offered a “wonderful taste of a very complicated history,” according to Roberta Smith of The New York Times. With an extensive plate section, which includes works from the exhibition and a selection of important pieces from the permanent collection of Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, this volume provides readers with a rich visual experience of this crucial period in modernism’s history. The catalogue also features an extensively researched illustrated chronology, compiled by Susanna Temkin, which tracks the development of the period artistically and politically from 1939 through 1964. New scholarship by Abigail McEwen offers an interpretative framework for this group of artists, and a deeper understanding of the forces behind the development of this movement. Also included is a conversation between Lucas Zwirner and Pedro de Oraá, one of the central members of Los Diez.

Having begun his studio practice as a painter and draftsman, in 1985 Al Taylor (1948-1999) devised a uniquely innovative approach to process and materials that seamlessly enveloped drawings and three-dimensional objects as he created compositions that were grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Taylor ultimately sought to expand the possibilities of vision in his search for new ways of experiencing and imagining space, and his multi-layered investigations of perception across variant dimensions provide the viewer with an insight into the artist''s idiosyncratic thinking, his methodology, and his playful sense of humor. Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2015 exhibition at the gallery, this catalogue presents a comprehensive examination of Taylor’s Pet Stains and Puddles, which encompass a large grouping of interconnected series that were created between 1989 and 1992; as well as works from Taylor’s later series Full Gospel Neckless (sic) that the artist made in Denmark for his 1997 solo exhibition at Galleri Tommy Lund. The objects and drawings that comprise these series demonstrate Taylor’s relentless curiosity about the process of seeing—that is, how we see and what we see, which he systematically explored by applying a multitude of constantly shifting points of view. The artist’s investigations combined metaphor with seemingly incongruous materials and concepts in order to find new relationships between subject matter, space, and meaning. This fully illustrated publication will feature new scholarship on Taylor’s work by Mimi Thompson.

During the 1990s, Franz West’s work moved in new and innovative stylistic directions, as his career was solidified through important international exhibitions. This publication delves into this significant decade in an effort to contextualize the evolution of West’s singular practice. The 1990s proved critical in the development of the idiosyncratic style for which West is still known today. His key innovations from this period—which included the addition of exuberant color to his papier-mâché forms, the incorporation of furniture both as art object and as social incubator, and the inclusion of work by other artists in his own installations—resulted in dynamic, frequently interactive installations that helped to expand the possibilities of sculpture and the ways in which art is experienced. Produced on the occasion of David Zwirner’s 2014 exhibition in New York, this fully illustrated publication gives an in-depth overview of the decade, arguably the most important of the artist’s lengthy career. It features essays by noted West scholars Eva Badura-Triska and Veit Loers, as well as a personal account by Bernhard Riff on video collaborations made with the artist throughout the 1990s.

With the call of "record, label, playback," a group of young artists reiterated the language of a city's cultural offerings, often without a full understanding of what they were reciting, but always with an acute aesthetic interest in the faults of transmission and transference.

Featuring large-scale reproductions of toys, household items, or luxury goods, this title also shows the culture from which they are extracted.