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

Spotlight Series

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

ekphrasis

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

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

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.

Ruth Asawa with hanging wire sculpture, 1951. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust

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

Clarrie Wallis

Rose Wylie trained as an artist in the 1950s, but it was her re-engagement with painting in the early 1980s, after a period spent raising a family, that marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to evolve and impress. This monograph, the first of its kind, follows Wylie\s fascinating artistic journey, celebrating her achievements while also examining her current practice.

Rose Wylie\s large-scale paintings are inspired by a wide range of visual culture. Her subject-matter ranges from contemporary Egyptian Hajj wall paintings and Persian miniatures to films, news stories, celebrity gossip and her observation of daily life. Often working from memory, she distills her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections. In weaving together imagery from different sources with personal elements, Wylie's paintings offer a direct and wry commentary on contemporary culture. Her pictures refuse judgment but reveal a concern with the everyday that makes visible its enigmatic core.

Drawing on a series of extended interviews with the artist, Clarrie Wallis unpicks the complexities of Wylie's visual language, so providing an important contribution to our understanding and appreciation of a significant and increasingly celebrated figure in contemporary British art.

Rose Wylie

César Aira

Katherine Silver

By César Aira. Translated by Katherine Silver. Foreword by Will Chancellor. Afterword by Alexandra Kleeman

Translated into English for the first time, 

, 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 

 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.

On Contemporary Art

John Ruskin

Robert Hewison

By John Ruskin. Introduction by Robert Hewison

The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history, birth, life, and death of Christ, ranks among the greatest artworks ever created.

John Ruskin helped redefine art criticism in the nineteenth century through his attention to detail, his playful and engaging prose, and the conviction with which he discussed the subjects that mattered most to him. Ruskin’s ekphrastic writing became a way for readers to approach the experience of looking at great art without actually seeing it in person. Despite having written about Giotto on numerous occasions in 

, he never treated the Arena Chapel in its own right. Here Ruskin examines the panels and brings them life, describing their many hidden details, all the result of Giotto’s unrivaled genius. As Ruskin says, “Giotto was…one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

Long out of print, the Arundel Society first published 

between 1853 and 1860. It stands as Ruskin’s most compelling set of reflections on Giotto’s masterpiece—an artwork that, in Ruskin’s estimation, changed the very course of art history. Originally accompanied by a set of black and white woodcuts of the panels in the Chapel, this new edition presents each panel in vivid color photography, adding a useful visual aid to Ruskin’s lyrical descriptions. The result is a book that serves not only as an introduction for students of art history, but also as a discussion of what it means to be a great artist, by one of most influential writers ever to tackle visual art.

Giotto and His Works in Padua

Donald Shambroom

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, 

 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, 

 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.

Duchamp's Last Day 

A gelatin silver print by Diane Arbus, titled Triplets in their bedroom, N.J. 1963, dated 1963.

, bastion of late modernism, featured the work of a photographer for the very first time. On its cover and in a six-page spread, it published selections from Diane Arbus's portfolio, 

. In the words of the magazine’s editor and photography skeptic, Philip Leider, “The portfolio changed everything . . . one could no longer deny [photography’s] status as art.” At the time of Arbus’s death, two months later, only four of the intended edition of fifty had been sold. Two had been purchased from Arbus by Richard Avedon (the first for himself, the second as a gift for his friend Mike Nichols); another was purchased by Jasper Johns; and a fourth by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar. Arbus signed the prints in all four sets; each print was accompanied by an interleaving vellum slip-sheet inscribed with an extended caption. For Feitler, Arbus added an eleventh photograph, 

Acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., in 1986—and the only one of the four completed and sold by Arbus that is publicly held—that portfolio was the subject of an exhibition on view at the museum in 2018. This exceptional book replicates the nature of Diane Arbus’s original and now legendary object. Smithsonian curator John P. Jacob, who has unearthed a trove of new information in preparing the book and exhibition, weaves a fascinating tale of the creation, production, and continuing repercussions of this seminal work.

Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

Richard Shiff

David Zwirner

Texts by Richard Shiff and Robert Storr. Foreword by David Zwirner

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.

David Zwirner: 25 Years

Bill Traylor, Photograph by Horace Perry, Courtesy Alabama State Council on the Arts

Texts by Valérie Rousseau and Debra Purden

Born into slavery around 1853-4 on a cotton plantation in Benton, Alabama, Traylor has become one of the most important self-taught artists of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most celebrated African-American artists, along with Thorton Dial and William Edmondson. The story of Bill Traylor's life and work is a remarkable one. It is a story that deserves attention both nationally and internationally.

This publication, generously illustrated with full-page high-quality reproductions, provides a close examination of Traylor's recurrent themes, composition schemes, favored iconography, and contextual information related to the artist's biography, creative process and tools, visual environment, and artistic mindset.

Each artwork is considered in a context beyond that of an isolated image and in response to one another, forming a series of intricate and consistent narratives, intriguingly cinematic in its development. The elements of Traylor's biography are the anchors of an individual mythology. Instead of merely being a basic depiction, the subject becomes a visual statement structuring Traylor's mind, bringing together hidden symbols from Kongo Vodou, Hoodoo, Southern Baptist, Freemasonry, and Blues sources, as well as layers of references: slavery, uncensored violence in the Jim Crow era, and turbulence within the black enclave known as 'Dark Town' in Montgomery, Alabama.

Bill Traylor

Michael Rooks

Allegra Pesenti

Lawrence Rinder

Randall Suffolk

Text by Michael Rooks. Contributions by Allegra Pesenti, Lawrence R. Rinder, and Robert Storr. Foreword by Randall Suffolk

 is the first major exhibition in the United States of work by the late American artist Al Taylor and represents nearly two decades of his career with sculptures, drawings, and prints that together reveal the polyglot nature of Taylor’s visual language and the reciprocity in his practice among drawing, constructing objects, printmaking, and observing. Works produced in one medium triggered the continuation of Taylor’s thought process in another or led to separate but related avenues of exploration across media. This mutual exchange resulted in elusive images and objects that offer propositions that often seem more scientific in nature than artistic, engendered by a process through which Taylor sought to realize works that might “create their own logic.” His voracious and omnivorous curiosity about the most quotidian things transformed these subjects into hypotheses for a series of unlikely and humorous observations grounded in the physicality of the real world. The fully illustrated catalogue includes essays by Michael Rooks, the High Museum’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; Allegra Pesenti, Associate Director of the Hammer Museum and Senior Curator of UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; Lawrence Rinder, Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and Robert Storr, artist, critic, curator, and professor of painting and printmaking at Yale University.

Al Taylor: What Are You Looking At?

Jarrett Earnest

The most comprehensive portrait of art criticism ever assembled, as told by the leading writers of our time.

In the last fifty years, art criticism has flourished as never before. Moving from niche to mainstream, it is now widely taught at universities, practiced in newspapers, magazines, and online, and has become the subject of debate by readers, writers, and artists worldwide.

Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, 

 offers an unprecedented overview of American art writing. These thirty in-depth conversations chart the role of the critic as it has evolved from the 1960s to today, providing an invaluable resource for aspiring artists and writers alike. John Ashbery recalls finding Rimbaud’s poetry through his first gay crush at sixteen; Rosalind Krauss remembers stealing the design of October from Massimo Vignelli; Paul Chaat Smith details his early days with Jimmy Durham in the American Indian Movement; Dave Hickey talks about writing country songs with Waylon Jennings; Michele Wallace relives her late-night and early-morning interviews with James Baldwin; Lucy Lippard describes confronting Clement Greenberg at a lecture; Eileen Myles asserts her belief that her negative review incited the Women’s Action Coalition; and Fred Moten recounts falling in love with Renoir while at Harvard.

Jarrett Earnest’s wide-ranging conversations with critics, historians, journalists, novelists, poets, and theorists—each of whom approach the subject from unique positions—illustrate different ways of writing, thinking, and looking at art.

 Hilton Als, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Yve-Alain Bois, Huey Copeland, Holland Cotter, Douglas Crimp, Darby English, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Dave Hickey, Siri Hustvedt, Kellie Jones, Chris Kraus, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Molly Nesbit, Jed Perl, Barbara Rose, Jerry Saltz, Peter Schjeldahl, Barry Schwabsky, Paul Chaat Smith, Roberta Smith, Lynne Tillman, Michele Wallace, and John Yau.

Interviews with Art Critics

What it Means to Write About Art 

Sherry Turner DeCarava

Photographs by Roy DeCarava. Text by Langston Hughes. Afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava

“The people in these photographs had no walls up. They just accepted me and permitted me to take their photographs without any self-consciousness.” —Roy DeCarava

 is a “poem” about ordinary people, about teenagers around a jukebox, about children at an open fire hydrant, about riding the subway alone at night, about picket lines and artist work spaces. This renowned, life-affirming collaboration between artist Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes honors in words and pictures what the authors saw, knew, and felt deeply about life in their city.

Hughes’s heart-warming description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is seen through the eyes of one grandmother, Sister Mary Bradley. As she guides the reader through the lives of those around her, we imagine the babies born, families in struggle, children yet flourishing. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem as seen through her learned and worldly eyes, expressed here through Hughes’s poetic prose. As she states, “I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” DeCarava’s photographs lay open a world of sense and feeling that begins with his perception and vision. The ruminations go beyond the limit of simple observation and contend with deeper meanings to reveal these individuals as subjects worthy of art. While Hughes states “We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” the photographs bring us back to this lively dialogue and a complex reality, to a resolution that stands with the optimism of the photographic medium and the certainty of DeCarava’s artistic moment.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result in 

, a moving, photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration, reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. First published in 1955, the book, widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature, was reprinted by public demand several times. This fourth printing, the Heritage Edition, is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing the history and ongoing importance of this book.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (softcover)

Christian Viveros-Fauné

In an increasingly polarized world, with shifting and extreme politics, 

 illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance. Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through crucial artworks, it also asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises.

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art

, renowned critic, curator, and writer Christian Viveros-Fauné has picked fifty representative artworks—from Francisco de Goya’s 

 (1993)—that give voice to some of modern art’s strongest calls to political action. In accessible and witty entries on each piece, Viveros-Fauné paints a picture of the context in which each work was created, the artist’s background, and the historical impact of each contribution. At times artists create projects that subvert existing power structures; at other moments they make artwork so powerful it challenges the very fabric of society. Whether it is Picasso’s 

 and its place at the 1937 Worlds Fair, or Jenny Holzer’s 

 (1977–1979), which still stop us in our tracks, this book tells the story behind some of the most important and unexpected encounters between artworks and the real worlds they engage with.


Never professing to be a definitive history of political art, 

 delivers a unique and compelling portrait of how artists during the last 150 years have dealt with changing political systems, the violence of modern warfare, the rise of consumer culture worldwide, the prevalence of inequality and racism, and the challenges of technology.

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art 

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

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

Michael Bracewell

The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, 

 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 

Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

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 

 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.

Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost 

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

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 

(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 

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.

Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings 2014–2017

This richly illustrated publication accompanies Rose Wylie’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery exhibition 

, which includes paintings and works on paper dating from the late 1990s to the present day, some never previously exhibited. Wylie creates paintings of visually compelling images that she encounters on a day-to-day basis, finding inspiration in a variety of sources: personal memories, art history, contemporary cinema, sport, news and celebrity stories. Driven by a relentless curiosity and instilled with wit, her paintings propose new perspectives on the world and the plethora of images that make up our collective cultural memory.

Alongside plates of all paintings in the exhibition, this publication expands upon Wylie’s practice and presents images of additional paintings, works on paper and preparatory drawings from her new series based on Hyde Park. This catalogue features an introductory text by Curator Melissa Blanchflower. Writer Barry Schwabsky offers a dialogue on the nature and objectives of painting. Artists Tal R and Alvaro Barrington have written instinctive and poetic responses to Wylie’s unique approach to image and mark-making, whilst Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has contributed a fictional text in three parts set in Hyde Park, that loosely take images in Wylie’s paintings and their potential for narrative as touchstones.

Rose Wylie: Quack Quack

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Laura Hoptman

Udo Kultermann

Catherine Taft

Akira Tatehata

Texts by Akira Tatehata, Laura Hoptman, Udo Kultermann, and Catherine Taft

An updated edition of the acclaimed monograph, celebrating one of the most iconic and revolutionary artists of our time.

"Yayoi Kusama transcended the art world to become a fixture of popular culture, in a league with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Keith Haring." —

Kusama is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on themes such as infinity, self-image, sexuality, and compulsive repetition. A well-known name in the Manhattan scene of the 1960s, Kusama's subsequent work combined Psychedelia and Pop culture with patterning, often resulting in participatory installations and series of paintings. This revised and expanded edition of the 2000 monograph, has been augmented by an essay by Catherine Taft and a collection of new poems by the artist.

Revised and Expanded Edition

Yayoi Kusama

Phong Bui

Edited by Jarrett Earnest and Lucas Zwirner. Introduction and portraits by Phong Bui

 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 

’s contributors have interviewed over four hundred artists for 

. 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; 

’s strength lies in its ability to include and champion difference.

Selected and coedited by Jarrett Earnest, a frequent 

 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.

 Vito Acconci, Ai Weiwei, Lynda Benglis, James Bishop, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Francesco Clemente, Bruce Conner, Alex Da Corte, Rosalyn Drexler, Keltie Ferris, Simone Forti, Andrea Fraser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Suzan Frecon, Coco Fusco, Robert Gober, Leon Golub, Ron Gorchov, Michelle Grabner, Josephine Halvorson, Sheila Hicks, David Hockney, Roni Horn, House of Ladosha, Alfredo Jaar, Bill Jensen, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Matvey Levenstein, Nalini Malani, Brice Marden, Chris Martin, Jonas Mekas, Shirin Neshat, Thomas Nozkowski, Lorraine O’Grady, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Ernesto Pujol, Martin Puryear, Walid Raad, Dorothea Rockburne, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Robert Ryman, Dana Schutz, Richard Serra, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sarah Sze, Rirkrit Tiravanija, James Turrell, Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans, Kara Walker, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten, Yan Pei-Ming, and Lisa Yuskavage

Special thanks to Furthermore, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, for their support of 

Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail

Tell Me Something Good

All Books

Collect: Discover, Buy and Sell Art

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.

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