Sherry Turner DeCarava

Zoé Whitley

Preface by Zoé Whitley. Introduction and text by Sherry Turner DeCarava

 presents the first survey since 1996 of photographer Roy DeCarava, an essential figure of American art and culture, whose “poetry of vision” re-forms urban life, labor, love, and jazz into the discovery of “an intimate, emotional arc of transformation.”

Though DeCarava often refrained from public discussion of his work, this catalogue provides important background into determining factors of his aesthetic sensibility—his traditional training in painting and printmaking as well as his philosophical undertakings. It brings the viewer to a consideration of contradictory precepts in DeCarava’s work that seeks resolution through tonal and structural elements within the image.

 presents a wide-ranging selection of DeCarava’s photographs accompanied by a preface by Zoé Whitley, an American curator based in London, and features an introduction and essay by curator and art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava. Titled “Celebration,” Turner DeCarava’s essay considers the artist’s singular poetic vision, his timeless portrayals of individuals and places, and his mastery of composition and photographic printmaking.

As Whitley writes, “In making photographs, as in life, DeCarava was patient. Possessing both a peerless self-awareness and acute observational skills, he knew intuitively when to wait and when to open the camera’s shutter. In the dark room, he availed himself of these same attributes, moving with steady assurance to develop his prints so as to allow the full range of what he called his ‘infinite scale of grey tones’—often realized at the deepest end of the spectrum—to emerge slowly and fully.”

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of DeCarava’s work at David Zwirner, New York in 2019, this exquisite volume showcases a dynamic range of images that underscore DeCarava’s subtle mastery of tonal and spatial elements across a wide, fascinating array of subject matter: from the figural implications of smoke and debris to the “shimmering mirror beneath a mother as she walks with her children in the morning light.” These photographs express a strength of imagery—an intent to synchronize and honor the pulse of art as an emergent signal for creative and revelatory freedom.

Roy DeCarava: Light Break

14.08.041_mama-mummy-and-mamma-predecessors-2_splash_1

Portrait of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo by Stefan Ruiz

Edited by Ian Berry and Steven Matijcio. Interview by Ian Berry. Essays by Malik Gaines and Steven Matijcio

 unites works from the artist’s Predecessors series. Investigating the confluences, contact zones, and third spaces of culture, Akunyili Crosby represents the people and places closest to her: the women of her family, her partner, the interiors of her grandmother’s home and her own. Even in the midst of such personal themes, Akunyili Crosby opens these painted worlds to her viewers, and invites them to reflect upon their own experiences, memories, and emotions.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Predecessors

Portrait of Neo Rauch, 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter.

Daniel Kehlmann

Spotlight Series

One of the most influential figurative painters of his generation, Neo Rauch presents bold, new work in 

Rauch is widely celebrated for his captivating compositions that bring together figurative painting and surrealism into an entirely new kind of visual encounter. They often hint at broader narratives and histories—seemingly reconnecting with artistic traditions of realism—but they remain dreamlike and impossible to reduce to a single story. Though his art is highly refined and executed with great technical skill, Rauch himself stresses the intuitive, deeply personal nature of how he works. As the artist notes, “My process is far less a reflection than it is drawing from the sediments of my past, which occurs in an almost trance-like state.”

Eight large-scale canvases and seven smaller, more intimately scaled works continue the artist’s exploration of figuration and the ambiguous nature of meaning in visual art. In some of the larger works, the saturation of the canvas with characters, objects, and forms, all rendered at different scales and in conflicting arrangements, creates a collage-like quality—a figurative scrapbook of Rauch’s personal iconography.

The publication features a short story by German novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann, which was inspired by the paintings in this book. The fantastical text moves between present-day New York and an unknown time of enchanted forests, knights, and witches, exploring the many layers found in Rauch’s canvases. Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong in 2019, 

Neo Rauch: PROPAGANDA

Laila Pedro

Lying deep within the urban metropolis of Hong Kong, Happy Valley is one of the most iconic racecourses in the world. It is also the chief source of inspiration for a new body of work by American artist Marcel Dzama.

Jockeys ride through waves and cathedrals, Chinese symbols pulled from racing paraphernalia adorn the edges of paper, and bats swoop, hunting for prey. Dzama’s distinct visions of the racetrack come alive through a series of large-scale paintings and drawings, transposing imagery from his prolific oeuvre into this adrenaline-filled sporting arena. His new works reflect on the culture of horseracing and how the track has become not only a symbol of sport, but also of commerce, class, and wealth.

The publication includes a conversation between Dzama and Laila Pedro. Published on the occasion of his solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong in 2019, 

Marcel Dzama: Crossing the Line

A painting by Lisa Yuskavage titled Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture, dated 2018-2020

Lisa Yuskavage, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Jarrett Earnest

Hanna Schouwink

Text by Jarrett Earnest. Foreword by Hanna Schouwink

 is the first survey of the artist’s small-scale paintings. While Yuskavage is primarily known for larger canvases, these intimate works offer a new window into her transgressive paintings and complex and influential oeuvre.

Based on the artist’s imagination, live models, maquettes, and found and staged photographs, the small paintings in this book demonstrate Yuskavage’s methodical exploration of how images are created and their sources. Some of the small works are studies for large paintings, while others revisit preexisting images. Yet others are one-of-a-kind compositions only created on this intimate scale. As places for experimenting with color, form, and characters as well as a variety of formats—including stretched and unstretched linen, canvas boards, wood, and paper—these paintings play a remarkably dynamic and pivotal role within her work. This catalogue presents the paintings to scale so readers can explore the works as if seeing them in person.

Documenting the artist’s exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018, this catalogue includes an essay by Jarrett Earnest that illuminates Yuskavage’s early influences and explores the constant, often surprising themes that can be found throughout her art.

Small Paintings, 1985–2018

Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood

Portrait of Kerry James Marshall, 2018. Photo by Jason Bell

Teju Cole

Hal Foster

Kerry James Marshall is one of America’s greatest living painters. 

 presents a groundbreaking body of new work that engages with the history of the medium itself.

, the artist has widened his scope to include both figurative and nonfigurative works that deal explicitly with art history, race, and gender, as well as force us to reexamine how artworks are received in the world and in the art market. In the paintings in this book, Marshall’s critique of history and of dominant white narratives is present, even as the subjects of the paintings move between reproductions of auction catalogues, abstract works, and scenes of everyday life.

Essays by Teju Cole and Hal Foster help readers navigate the artist’s masterful vision, decoding complexly layered works such as 

 (2018) and Marshall’s own artistic philosophy. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Marshall’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, London, in 2018.

Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting

Paul Klee and Hans Bloesch met while they were still in school and remained friends all their lives. They also took their first steps as artists together: Bloesch as a writer, Klee as a painter. From 1902 to 1905 they collaborated on an open project, which they simply called "Das Buch" (The Book). Bloesch contributed poems, Klee watercolors and drawings. However, they finally lost interest in it and "Das Buch" was abandoned.

Today it represents an extraordinary discovery because it contains many previously unknown works by Paul Klee and for the first time provides a broad insight into his early artistic development. This volume contains a facsimile of "Das Buch" including transcripts, commentaries, and two essays on this astonishing discovery.

A Joint Project from the Years 1902 to 1905

Hans Bloesch and Paul Klee: Das Buch

A still from a film by Francis Alys, titled Children’s Game #26: Kisolo, Tabacongo, DR Congo, dated 2021.

A detail of an artwork by Michaël Borremans titled The Commuter II dated 2022

Portrait of Michaël Borremans, 2025. Photo by Charlie De Keersmaecker 

Sigmar Polke, Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

Dawn Ades

Olivier Berggruen

J. Patrice Marandel

Nicholas Hall

Texts by Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, and J. Patrice Marandel. Introduction by Nicholas Hall

Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art

 explores the ways in which artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion.

 takes as its point of departure Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s legendary 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

, which not only introduced these movements to the American public, but also placed them in a historical and cultural context by situating them with artists from earlier centuries.

Presenting works from the twelfth century to the present day, this catalogue is organized into six themes—Monsters & Demons, Dreams & Temptation, Fragmented Body, Unconscious Gesture, Super Nature, and Sense of Place. Works included range from medieval gargoyles to twentieth-century works by Louise Bourgeois, Sigmar Polke, and Pablo Picasso as well as contemporary works by Michaël Borremans, Marcel Dzama, and Raymond Pettibon. Masterworks from the likes of Piero di Cosimo, Francisco de Goya, and Titian are considered alongside those by William Blake and Odilon Redon. Time folds and temporal barriers collapse when Damiano Cappelli meets Edvard Munch, and Salvator Rosa encounters Luc Tuymans and Lisa Yuskavage. Salvador Dalí, Sherrie Levine, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Kerry James Marshall—eight centuries intersect and, as such, this wide-ranging catalogue examines affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time.

Organized in collaboration with Nicholas Hall, a specialist in the field of Old Masters and nineteenth-century art, this fully illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018. It includes new scholarship by Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, and J. Patrice Marandel.

 presents sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling 

This collection of interviews engages a diverse range of topics, from philosophy and politics to Judd’s insightful critiques of his own work and the work of others such as Mark di Suvero, Edward Hopper, Yayoi Kusama, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. The opening discussion of the volume between Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella provides the foundation for many of the succeeding conversations, focusing on the nature and material conditions of the new art developing in the 1960s. The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums, such as radio and film, including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose.

Judd’s contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, whether in dialogue with art critics, art historians, or his contemporaries. In one of the last interviews with Christopher Felver, Judd observed, “Generally, expensive art is in expensive, chic circumstances; it’s a falsification. The society is basically not interested in art. And most people who are artists do that because they like the work; they like to do that [make art]. Art has an integrity of its own and a purpose of its own, and it’s not to serve the society. That’s been tried now in the Soviet Union and lots of places, and it doesn’t work. The only role I can think of, in a very general way, for the artist is that it [art] tends to shake up the society a little bit just by its existence, in which case it helps undermine the general political stagnation and, perhaps by providing a little freedom, supports science, which requires freedom. If the artist isn’t free, you won’t have any art."

 is copublished by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. The interviews expand upon the artist’s thinking present in 

 (Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).

Donald Judd Interviews

Installation view of Carol Bove at the Met, New York, 2022.

Johanna Burton

Interview with the artist by Johanna Burton

 presents new work by “sculpture’s woman of steel,” as coined by Randy Kennedy in 

. Her new sculptures expand on her investigations of materiality and form.

Characterized by compositions of various types of steel, Bove’s ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” begun in 2016, amalgamates theoretical and art-historical influences across time periods and disciplines. To create these lyrical and abstract assemblages, Bove pairs fabricated tubing that has been crushed and shaped at her studio with found metal scraps and a single highly polished disk. Luminous color is applied to parts of the composition, transforming the steel—more commonly associated with inflexibility and heft—into something that appears malleable and lightweight, like clay, fabric, or crinkled paper.

Bove’s new works are smaller in scale and elaborate on the “collage sculptures,” with more complex forms that twist, fold, and bend into postures that belie their material construction. She manipulates steel to varying degrees, rendering gentle folds in some, and extreme, almost anthropomorphic contortions in others. Their contrasting textures—matte, glossy, or rough—create a further sense of visual play, heightening the surface tension throughout.

This publication features a new interview with the artist by Johanna Burton. Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, 

Carol Bove: Ten Hours

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Helen Molesworth

Ginny Neel

Text by Helen Molesworth. Introduction by Ginny Neel. Contribution by Marlene Dumas

One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people.

Known for her daringly honest portraits, Neel loved to paint people in all their complexities—to penetrate and reveal their fears and anxieties. She also loved to paint the unadorned human figure. Her nudes, in particular, explore the body with frankness while celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects, and they exemplify the freedom and courage with which she approached her work and her life.

Through her paintings and works on paper, Neel was able to free herself from the expected inhibitions and crippling taboos that were placed on women and focus on the beauty and nuanced complexity of flesh and the human body. In their mastery of form, color, and implied social commentary, her nudes are as relevant today as when they were painted.

 documents the solo exhibition of the artist’s work at David Zwirner in New York in 2019. Including works that span the 1920s to the 1980s, this presentation focuses primarily on the nude figure—whether male or female, adult or child—and demonstrates how Neel rebelled against and challenged the traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty in our society. The catalogue includes newly commissioned scholarship by Helen Molesworth and an introduction by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel.

Learn more about the artist 

Alice Neel: Freedom

Patrick Modiano

Dominique Zehrfuss

Damion Searls

ekphrasis

Poems by Patrick Modiano. Illustrated by Dominique Zehrfuss. Translated with an introduction by Damion Searls

Published in English for the first time, 

 is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss.

 is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 

 captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano.

Zehrfuss’s paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover—perhaps they are not so different—relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing—poetry inspired by paintings—this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience.

First published by Editions de l’Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

28 Paradises

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Fred Moten

Seeing Shakespeare

By William Shakespeare. Illustrated by Chris Ofili. Introduction by Fred Moten

 remains one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlights the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has.

In the twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in 

 the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him.

Dialogues:
The David Zwirner Podcast
Chris Ofili and Emily Wilson

 in front of an audience at the 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, and lies.

William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

Claire Messud

Marlene Dumas’s works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery.

 documents a selection of paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture.

Alongside these paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem 

 is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

Luc Tuymans in his studio, 2022. Photo by Otman Q

Eva Meyer-Hermann

Over the course of four decades, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has created his own distinctive vernacular, a new visual vocabulary. The second volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly two hundred works, including some of his most iconic canvases.

Between the years 1995 and 2006, Tuymans’s work trended toward ideas of national and collective memory. In 1996, the artist created a group of ten paintings entitled 

, for which he transformed familiar images of American life, such as Mount Rushmore, baseball caps, and the United States flag, into unsettling visions, addressing the country’s perceived vulnerability, both physical and psychological, following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Paintings from 

, his seminal body of work that was first shown at David Zwirner, New York, in 2000, after which he expanded the series for his presentation for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, depict imagery derived from the fraught history of Belgian colonial rule of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also included is one of Tuymans’s best-known paintings, 

 (2005), a powerful yet seemingly vulnerable portrayal of Condoleezza Rice, which conjures the long history of racial and sexual prejudice in the United States, not as something that has been overcome, but as an active force shaping our reality.

This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1995–2006

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 2

An installation view of an exhibition titled Andra Ursuta: Void Fill at David Zwirner, Paris, in 2021.

Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Ali Subotnick.

Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

Andra Ursuta: 2000 Words

This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works from the vital early years of his career

Credited with a key role in the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) continues to produce subtle, and at times unsettling, works that engage with history, technology, and everyday life. This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works that were vital to his artistic development. The years 1972 to 1994 witnessed the maturation of his signature method of painting from preexisting imagery—such as magazine images, Polaroids, and television footage—as well as his first solo exhibition. Also dating from this period are many of his seminal canvases, along with ten poignant portraits of the ailing human body and the enigmatic series Superstition that comprised his first works exhibited in the United States.

The catalogue features brilliant new photography of each of the paintings and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation shots of the works in this volume. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1972–1994

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 1

A detail from a painting by Katherine Bernhardt, titled Escape from New York, dated 2020.

Vivid paintings of Swatch watches from the collection of Katherine Bernhardt

New York painter Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975) began collecting Swatch watches as a teenager in suburban Saint Louis. Obsessed by their shapes, variety of graphics and their air of pop sophistication, they became a constant in Bernhardt's visual life. She has completed numerous paintings of Swatches over the last decade, and this volume, published on the occasion of her Swatch-focused exhibition in August 2017 at Karma, pictures her original Swatch collection, kept for all these years, as well as a generous selection of her Swatch-themed paintings.

Katherine Bernhardt: Swatches

This book collects drawings, supplemented by her own photographs, by artist Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975), of midcentury modern houses in the Hamptons, Fire Island and Martha's Vineyard. Bernhardt spent the summer of 2017 living at Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton. She and her son embarked on bike rides around the area, and Bernhardt became fascinated by, as she writes, "huge and small wonderful wood and glass masterpieces, some with crazy window shapes, some A-frames, some with concrete, all interesting designs ... I started making fast black ink sumi-e-like drawings of the houses, breaking down the houses to their basic forms of line." Featuring an introductory text by the artist and a historical overview by David Sokol of architecture in the Hamptons, 

 offers a unique, personal account of the forms and structures of modernist vacation homes.

Katherine Bernhardt: Houses

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Allie Biswas

Interview with the artist by Allie Biswas

Presenting recent developments in Wolfgang Tillmans’s portraiture and still lifes, 

 features a broad selection of new and recent works that respond to their surroundings while at the same time embodying a self-contained environment.

Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced a younger generation more than Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium, and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.

Published on the occasion of Tillmans’s exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong in 2018, this fully bilingual catalogue juxtaposes pictures of intimacy and friendship with views and angles of the world at large. An aerial view of the Sahara desert displays almost infinite detail while being monochromatic and near-abstract in appearance. In line with Tillmans’s interest in exhibitions as amplifiers of a particular, underlying perspective, each of the works engages in an intricate system of relationships between its aesthetic elements, subject, and institutional setting. Seen together, they implicate the viewer as an active part of the dialogue. The 2016 interview with author Allie Biswas of 

 has been edited and expanded by the artist for this catalogue.

Wolfgang Tillmans: DZHK Book 2018

Texts by James Rondeau, Kate Nesin, and Juliane Rebentisch

This publication examines both the art-historical framework of Tomma Abts’s painting as well as its deep philosophical and psychological dimensions.

With a rigorous approach and self-imposed limitations to both scale and composition, Tomma Abts (b. 1967) has reinvigorated painterly abstraction and its relevance within contemporary art. Using a fixed canvas size and a vertical format, Abts deploys basic formal elements such as arcs, circles, planes, and stripes to create powerful works that are at once subtle and eccentric. This extraordinary book, designed in collaboration with the artist herself, is a substantial and deeply insightful treatment of her career to date and features sixty works made over the past decade. Essays not only contextualize Abts’s work within an art-historical framework of methods, process, and style, but also examine her paintings’ philosophical and psychological dimensions and their embodiment of a creative process that transcends the specifics of any particular work.

Tomma Abts

Vernon Lee

Dylan Kenny

An openly lesbian, feminist writer, Vernon Lee—a pseudonym of Violet Paget—is the most important female aesthetician to come out of nineteenth century England.

Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy, and art criticism. An early follower of Walter Pater, her work is characterized by extreme attention to her own responses to artworks, and a level of psychological sensitivity rarely seen in any aesthetic writing. Today, she is largely overlooked in curriculums, her aesthetic works long out of print.

David Zwirner Books is reintroducing Lee’s writing through the first-ever English publication of "Psychology of an Art Writer" (1903) along with selections from her groundbreaking "Gallery Diaries" (1901–1904), breathtaking accounts of Lee’s own experiences with the great paintings and sculptures she traveled to see. Ranging from deeply felt assessments of the way mood affects our ability to appreciate art, to detailed descriptions of some of the most powerful personal experiences with artworks, these writings provide profound insights into the fields of psychology and aesthetics. Her philosophical inquiries in 

leave no stone unturned, combining fine-grained ekphrases with high fancy and dense abstraction. The diaries, in turn, establish Lee as one of the most sensitive writers about art in any language.

With a foreword by Berkeley classicist Dylan Kenny, which guides the reader through these writings and contextualizes these texts within Lee’s other work, this is the quintessential introduction to her astonishing and complex oeuvre.

The Psychology of an Art Writer

Diaries and journals have a long, complex history within visual culture. American artist Sherrie Levine continues the tradition with 

Inspired by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s 

 and its famed opening entries, written in 1953— “Monday: Me. Tuesday: Me. Wednesday: Me. Thursday: Me.”—Levine prints the word “ME.” on each calendar page in 

. Levine’s diary is a playful riff on autobiography amidst our narcissistic culture.

Sherrie Levine: Diary 2019

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Tiffany Bell

Robert Storr

Known for her extensive body of intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, American sculptor, educator, and arts advocate 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.

Ruth Asawa

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