Mark Godfrey

Roxana Marcoci

Text by Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, Christopher Williams, and Matthew S. Witkovsky

Representing Christopher Williams’s first publication with a major American museum, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Williams (b. 1956) has crafted photographs that engage—often through uncanny mimicry—the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, as well as their sociopolitical contexts and implications. The book includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, which explore Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with the methods and modes of display and publicity in the art world, in addition to a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain. These more conventional contributions are “interrupted” by additional historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself and are occasionally presented in facsimile form. An exhibition history, bibliography, and illustrated list of works round out the publication.

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

Kara Carmack

Diedrich Diederichsen

Bob Nickas

Foreword by David Zwirner. Texts by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas. Illustrated chronology by Kara Carmack

In the words of Peter Schjeldahl, writing in 

 at David Zwirner in New York, “the show’s cast of artists amounts to a retrospective shopping list of what would matter and endure in art of the era.” With an eye to canonizing that moment, this seminal publication examines the latter half of the 1980s through the lens of international art scenes that were based in Cologne—arguably the European center of the contemporary art world at that time—and New York.

While a number of established Cologne-based gallerists, including Karsten Greve, Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke, Michael Werner, and Rudolf Zwirner, had already begun shaping the European reception of American art in the previous decade, the 1980s marked a period during which art being produced in and around Cologne gained international attention. A burgeoning gallery scene supported the emerging work of artists based in the region, with gallerists such as Gisela Capitain, Rafael Jablonka, Max Hetzler, and Monika Spru¨th showing artists such as Walter Dahn, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. The works of these German artists were exhibited along with the latest contemporary art from the US by artists like Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Christopher Wool. Conversely, the works of German artists were presented in New York, with breakout exhibitions at galleries such as Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Luhring, Augustine & Hodes, and other significant venues. Important museum exhibitions that explored work being produced and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic also set the tone for this ongoing dialogue, among them 

A Distanced View: One Aspect of Recent Art from Belgium, France, Germany, and Holland

Big, bold, and vibrant, this Pentagram-designed publication revives the conversation, reproducing in full color over one hundred immensely varied artworks by the twenty-two international artists included in this massive exhibition—one of the largest in David Zwirner’s history. Beyond its stunning visual components, the book features crucial new scholarship by Diedrich Diederichsen and Bob Nickas, and an illustrated chronology of the decade by Kara Carmack. The book also includes an arsenal of compelling archival material, from documentary photographs from the period to reproductions of Cologne’s culture magazine Spex. Taken as a whole, this ambitious exhibition catalogue encapsulates the energy, heart, and “dissonance of styles”—in the words of Schjeldahl—embodied by this fascinating and fecund moment in global art history.

Artists featured in the book include Werner Büttner, George Condo, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Günther Förg, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Albert Oehlen, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, and Christopher Wool.

Als Gott den Rock erschuf muß er heil gewesen sein (Rockmusik III) (When God Created Rock, He Must Have Been Horny [Rock Music III])

No Problem: Cologne/New York 1984–1989

Mimi Thompson

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 

, which encompass a large grouping of interconnected series that were created between 1989 and 1992; as well as works from Taylor’s later series 

 (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.

Al Taylor: Pet Stains, Puddles, and Full Gospel Neckless

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Yayoi Kusama: I Who Have Arrived in Heaven

 features new work from the artist's critically acclaimed 2013 inaugural exhibition at David Zwirner, which spanned the gallery's three locations in New York. Kusama's extraordinary and highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design and interventions within existing architectural structures. 

Opening this book is a series of exquisitely produced color plates of brightly colored, large-format square paintings. Part of a recent body of work, they allude to universal spheres or basic life forms and highlight Kusama's unique amalgamation of representational and nonrepresentational subject matter. Also featured is the video installation, 

, in which the artist herself is seen performing a song she composed while an animated slideshow of selected artworks moves behind her and the two mirrored infinity rooms. 

Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away 

encompassed a cube-shaped, mirror-paneled room that featured a shallow reflecting pool as its floor; hundreds of multicolored LED lights were suspended at varying heights from the ceiling, flickering on and off in a strobelike effect. Another mirrored infinity room, 

, stands as one of Kusama's most immersive, kaleidoscopic environments to date. It was composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist's characteristic polka dots—that extended from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors.

Yayoi Kusama: I Who Have Arrived In Heaven

Foreword by Adam Lindemann. Text by Carlo McCormick

Since the 1970s Raymond Pettibon (born 1957) has created a vocabulary of symbols that reappear consistently if enigmatically across his oeuvre. These range from baseball players, vixens, light bulbs, and railway trains to the cartoon character Gumby and infamous murderer Charles Manson. But the most poetic and revealing of Pettibon's symbols may be the surfer, the solitary longboarder challenging a massive wave. In his "surfer paintings," viewers ride along with a counterculture existentialist hero who perhaps is the artist's nearest proxy. Almost all of the works included in this volume depict an ocean roiling with chaotic swells, accompanied by nonsequiturs, quotations, and bits of poetry in the artist's handwriting. Among these works are early small-scale, monochrome India ink paintings; numerous paintings from the 1990s when the artist introduced color to his work; and a group of rare, large-scale paintings.

Are Your Motives Pure?

Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985–2014

Book cover of Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball, David Zwirner, 2014

 as “the most original, controversial, and expensive American artist of the past three and a half decades,” Jeff Koons has come to reign as a master of the market, a wry puppeteer with a “formidable aesthetic intelligence.” His elaborate, exquisitely produced sculptures draw from a contemporary lexicon of consumerism—often featuring large-scale reproductions of toys, household items, or luxury goods—while simultaneously holding up a mirror to the very culture from which they are extracted.

These references to popular media are evidenced not merely in his choice of subject matter but also in his visual techniques: his sculptures frequently comprise smooth, mirrored surfaces, and his paintings employ bright and saturated colors.



—the first catalogue on the artist’s work to be published by David Zwirner—was produced on the occasion of the major 2013 exhibition at the gallery in New York, which marked the world debut of his 

 series, a brand new body of work that occupies an important place in the trajectory of his practice. Conceptually derived from the mirrored ornaments encountered on many suburban lawns, including those of Koons’s childhood hometown in rural Pennsylvania, every sculpture is anchored by a blue “gazing ball” of hand-blown glass. These are situated atop large, white-plaster sculptures that have been alternately modeled after iconic works from the Greco-Roman era, including the Farnese Hercules and the Esquiline Venus, or after such quotidian objects from the contemporary residential landscape as a rustic mailbox, a birdbath, and an inflatable garden snowman.

Created in close collaboration with Koons, this elegant publication echoes the classic design of a 1970 Picasso catalogue that the artist admires. Inside, vivid color plates of the sculptures in situ capture the stark contrast between the pristine whiteness of the plaster and the highly reflective spheres. In their perfect contours and smooth, glistening surfaces, the gazing balls implicate audience as well as context—mirroring both and offering playful yet powerful meditations on the dialogue between gaze and reflection. “While all of the sculptures are grounded in their own distinct narratives, derived from Art History and suburban towns,” writes Francesco Bonami in his catalogue essay, “the seemingly fragile and delicate gazing ball establishes that sense of uncertain equilibrium that exists between history and fantasy, magic and materiality, mass culture and exclusive beauty.”

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball

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

Johanna Burton

Peter Halley

Midori Matsui

Wolfgang Tillmans

Jan Verwoert

Texts by Johanna Burton, Peter Halley, Midori Matsui, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Jan Verwoert

Known since the early 1990s for his photographs of young people in their social environment – clubs, gay pride parades, warehouse parties – Wolfgang Tillmans created an enigmatic, sexy and highly innovative photography while inventing new icons of beauty and style for gallery goers and magazine readers alike. This book is an updated and expanded edition of his 2002 monograph, featuring a new survey on his work from the past ten years and new artist’s writings.

Lucas Zwirner

Kim Gordon

Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Text by Lucas Zwirner. Interview with the artist by Kim Gordon. Photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath

In the summer of 2013, Raymond Pettibon took over one of David Zwirner’s gallery spaces in New York, transforming the high-ceilinged, garage-like white cube into his studio in order to prepare a show of drawings and collages within—and sometimes directly on—its walls. Titled 

, evoking the Middle English expression that has come to express a certain formality today and is defined as “namely,” or “that is to say,” the exhibition gave new meaning to the term “site specific,” featuring vibrant, gestural works Pettibon created in conversation with his surroundings that operated as a sort of archive, both product and record of his relationship to that space and time. Unified by their bold, vivid lines and unconventional framing, they feature allusions to a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from violence, humor, and sex to literature, youth, art history, and sports—embodying the artist’s signature mix of social and political commentary, diary entry, and automatic drawing.

This publication, presenting large color plates of the works created over that summer by Pettibon, who also produced an original drawing for its sturdy cardboard cover, explores the intricate relationship between image and language that has long fascinated the artist. Just as the works in the exhibition existed at once as art and document, so too does the book itself have the hefty, physical presence of a work of art. Extensive installation views capture the dynamic combination of visual imagery and text that has come to characterize Pettibon’s practice, and a selection of gritty black-and-white photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s working process. Context is provided by Lucas Zwirner, who accompanied the artist throughout this period and contributed the book’s essay, “A Month with Raymond.” As Zwirner describes it, the show functioned “as an essayistic whole held together by imaginative leaps and subtle connections which Raymond has left unexplained and uninterpreted.” That perspective is rounded out in an interview with the artist by Kim Gordon, a visual artist and musician, who first encountered Pettibon’s work in the early 1980s in Los Angeles.

Raymond Pettibon: To Wit

Christine Mehring

Christoph Schreier

Texts by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier

 art critic Roberta Smith as a “precocious art star,” German artist (Blinky) Palermo (1943–1977) has been associated with distinct twentieth-century art practices, from abstraction to Minimalism and Conceptual art. But his diverse body of work in fact defies easy classification. Throughout his brief and influential career—leading all the way up to his untimely death at the age of 33—Palermo executed paintings, objects, installations, and works on paper that mined various contextual and semantic issues at stake in the construction, exhibition, and reception of works of art, eternally “stretching and questioning” the boundaries of every medium he touched.

This fully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by Christine Mehring and Christoph Schreier and documents the 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. It is the first publication to tackle Palermo’s late work, which is characterized by explorations of the tensions between material and color, surface and depth, and figuration and abstraction—focusing in particular on the paper works he produced between 1976 and 1977, the last year of his life. “Less a system builder than an analyst working on intuition,” writes Schreier in his catalogue essay, Palermo “explored surface, shape, and color—the constituent elements of the image—with the aim of turning them into actors with a lively and delicately balanced play of forces.” The simplicity of the artist’s vision is beautifully evinced by the catalogue’s vibrant color plates, which reveal every stroke and each grain of paper shining through from behind the pigment.

1976-1977

Palermo: Works on Paper

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

Described by Deborah Solomon in a New York Times profile as “one of contemporary art’s most compelling painters,” Marlene Dumas has continuously explored the complex range of human emotions, often probing questions of gender, race, sexuality, and economic inequality through her dramatic and at times haunting figural compositions. Originally published in 2010 on the occasion of 

, Dumas’s first solo presentation at David Zwirner in New York, this much sought-after exhibition catalogue—which sold out shortly after publication—has been reprinted to coincide with the artist’s 2014–2015 European retrospective exhibition 

, organized by Tate Modern, London in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel.

Throughout her career, the internationally renowned artist has continually created lyrically charged compositions that eulogize the frailties of the human body, probing issues of love and melancholy. At times her subjects are more topical, merging socio-political themes with personal experience and art-historical antecedents to reflect unique perspectives on the most salient and controversial issues facing contemporary society. The large-scale works included in 

 are primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting. 

, the painting that began the series, at first appears to present a scene at the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall), an important site of religious pilgrimage located in Jerusalem. However, this work is based upon a photograph from a newspaper that portrayed a group of Orthodox Jews on their way to pray at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. Through her delicate treatment of every scene, Dumas destabilizes preconceived notions about what, in fact, is being pictured—engaging the often ambiguous nature of ideas like truth or justice. “In a sense they are my first landscape paintings,” Dumas further notes in the catalogue, “or should I say ‘territory paintings.’ That is why they are so big.” The somber color plates reproduced in the publication are given context by Dumas’s own musings, a text framed as a letter to David Zwirner in which she tries to tell him “about the ‘why’ ” of this powerful series.

Marlene Dumas: Against the Wall

installation_view_john_mccracken_works_from_1963-2011_david_zwirner_new_york_2013_view_9

Portrait of John McCracken. Photo by Joe Goode

Robin Clark

Anne Reeve

Text by Robin Clark. Interview with the artist by Anne Reeve

My works are minimal and reduced, but also maximal. I try to make them concise, clear statements in three-dimensional form, and also to take them to a breathtaking level of beauty.

John McCracken occupies a singular position within the recent history of American art, as his work melds the restrained formal qualities of Minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. He developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective, smooth surfaces that he was to become known for.

Published on the occasion of the comprehensive presentation of McCracken\s work at David Zwirner, New York in 2013, this catalogue charts the evolution of the artist\s diverse oeuvre, encompassing both well-known and lesser-seen examples of his production from the early 1960s up through his death in 2011 with a range of sculptures, paintings, and sketches. Featuring new scholarship by art historian Robin Clark, it includes reproductions of fascinating archival and documentary material that was discovered during the curatorial process, from the artist’s sketches to gallery invitation cards, early catalogue covers, historic photographs, as well as installation views of the exhibition.

John McCracken: Works from 1963-2011

Jane McFadden

Nigel Prince

Anthony Spira

Jan Tumlir

Miguel von Hafe Pérez

James Welling

With contributions from Jan Tumlir, Jane McFadden, Anthony Spira, James Welling, Nigel Prince, and Miguel von Hafe Pérez

Bringing together important experimental works and ephemera, this volume documents a watershed moment in James Welling’s photographic career.

A seminal figure in the “Pictures Generation”—a group of artists working in 1980s New York—James Welling is best known for his pioneering use of photography and for engaging questions about art and the nature of representation. This book focuses on a particularly fecund period in Welling’s life, charting the works, influences, and shifting ideas that he has been pursuing ever since. Chronologically arranged, it features works from the 1970s and 1980s interspersed with never-before-seen watercolors, collages, notes, production stills, music, and other ephemera that provide insights into the working process of one of America’s most innovative and significant photographers.

James Welling: The Mind on Fire

Dieter Schwarz

From the beginning of his career, Fred Sandback (1943–2003) used drawing to formulate his ideas of sculptural volume. In pictures of existing rooms, Sandback explored the possibilities of spaces and planes by drawing his famous horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in colored pencil. In the 1980s, he expanded his drawing repertoire to include acrylic, the pochoir technique, and pastel. In these late drawings–considered to be more pictorial than his pencil sketches–Sandback elaborated on the experience of space, mass, and volume in ways impossible in a coherent space: many of these sculptural ideas are absolutely boundless. Only a specific section of the whole is intimated in the drawing, for which Sandback invented unusual techniques: actual incisions instead of drawn lines, for instance, or painterly traces on transparent film. Superbly produced and edited, 

 assembles works from a thirty-year span, supplemented by sculptural works.

Fred Sandback: Drawings

Over the course of his thirty-five year career, Christopher Williams has produced photographs that engage the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery—often through a wry combination of parody and homage—and explore their sociopolitical contexts and implications. Using the process of reproduction as a point of entry, the artist questions the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality.

 is the second volume in an ambitious series of books developed by Williams in conjunction with his first major museum survey, 

, a critically acclaimed exhibition co-organized for 2014-2015 by The Art Institute of Chicago with The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Whitechapel Gallery, London

Following the first publication, an exhibition catalogue that relied more heavily on text than image, 

was conceived to exist as a stand-alone visual object and extend the artist’s conceptual and aesthetic concerns into book form. A perfect companion to the first publication, it reproduces a carefully curated selection of Williams’s painstakingly constructed photographs and features striking graphic design in the near-complete absence of language, with no essay, captions, or even a title page. Through clever manipulations of cropping, ordering, and pagination, 

offers readers an original aesthetic experience and comprehensive insight into the practice of one of today’s most thought-provoking artists, while—through pure visual splendor—pushing the boundaries of the artist’s book into new realms. As with all publications in the series, it has been produced in three colors—yellow, red, and green—each of which features subtle differences in layout.

Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany (yellow)

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Massimiliano Gioni

Glenn Ligon

Minna Moore Ede

Alicia Ritson

Matthew Ryder

Robert Storr

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Texts by Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, Minna Moore Ede, Alicia Ritson, Matthew Ryder, Robert Storr, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

A major survey including new and celebrated works by Turner Prize–winning artist Chris Ofili. Set to accompany the first major museum show in the United States of contemporary British artist Chris Ofili, this richly illustrated volume surveys two decades of artworks that meld figuration, abstraction, and decoration to yield hybrid juxtapositions of high and low culture. Best known for intricately constructed works featuring beadlike dots of paint, elephant dung, and images culled from popular media, Ofili’s unique lexicon combines African culture, Western art history, and hip-hop music, spanning a wide variety of sources which include the Bible, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Blaxploitation films, and William Blake’s poems. Animated by exotic characters, outlandish landscapes, and folkloric myths, Ofili’s most recent work resonates with references to the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin. This compelling new book offers a fresh perspective on the artist’s vital practice, which both celebrates and calls into question the power of images and their ability to address fundamental questions of representation.

Chris Ofili: Night and Day

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

Richard Shiff

Robert Kudielka

Paul Moorhouse

Texts by Robert Kudielka, Paul Moorhouse, and Richard Shiff. Interview by Robert Kudielka.

Published on the occasion of Bridget Riley’s major exhibition at David Zwirner in London in the summer of 2014, this fully illustrated catalogue offers intimate explorations of paintings and works on paper produced by the legendary British artist over the past fifty years, focusing specifically on her recurrent use of the stripe motif. Riley has devoted her practice to actively engaging viewers through elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, creating visual experiences that at times trigger optical sensations of vibration and movement. The London show, her most extensive presentation in the city since her 2003 retrospective at Tate Britain, explored the stunning visual variety she has managed to achieve working exclusively with stripes, manipulating the surfaces of her vibrant canvases through subtle changes in hue, weight, rhythm, and density. As noted by Paul Moorhouse, “Throughout her development, Riley has drawn confirmation from Euge`ne Delacroix’s observation that ‘the first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.’ [Her] most recent stripe paintings are a striking reaffirmation of that principle, exciting and entrancing the eye in equal measure.”

Created in close collaboration with the artist, the publication’s beautifully produced color plates offer a selection of the iconic works from the exhibition. These include the artist’s first stripe works in color from the 1960s, a series of vertical compositions from the 1980s that demonstrate her so-called “Egyptian” palette—a “narrow chromatic range that recalled natural phenomena”—and an array of her modestly scaled studies, executed with gouache on graph paper and rarely before seen.

A range of texts about Riley’s original and enduring practice grounds and contextualizes the images, including new scholarship by art historian Richard Shiff, texts on both the artist’s wall paintings and newest body of work by Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a 1978 interview with Robert Kudielka, her longtime confidant and foremost critic. Additionally, the book features little-seen archival imagery of Riley at work over the years; documentation of her recent commissions for St. Mary’s Hospital in West London, taken especially for this publication; and installation views of the exhibition itself, installed throughout the three floors of the gallery’s eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse located in the heart of Mayfair.

Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014

Klaus Kertess

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 multilayered 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.

This publication focuses on two bodies of work by Taylor, 

. Although distinctly individual, both of these series examine Taylor’s lifelong explorations of the circle. In his 

 series from 1991–1992, the artist studied the inside and outside of circular forms and investigated the multi-dimensional possibilities that could be revealed by conceptually and physically moving “around” them to expose the mutable perception of their intrinsic shape. Using hula hoops, garden hoses, plastic-coated cables, and recycled bottle cap rings, he created three-dimensional spirals and coils, interlocking loops, and dissected circles that were mounted on the wall, left freestanding, or suspended by wires from the ceiling to activate changing perspectives. In this group of works, the artist renders conceptual ideas about the dimensionality of linear curves, the role of gravity and chance on motion, and the passage of time. In his 1993 

 series, Taylor expanded his circle “research” by investigating the play of light that would theoretically be reflected off of the exterior—or projected out of the interior of cylinders. In a group of wall-mounted constructions created out of tin cans, wood, hot-rolled steel bands, and asymmetrical lengths of wire, the artist characteristically “draws” in real space with objects that appear to vacillate between three and two dimensions. In his studies of tin cans, Taylor explores the formal concerns of composition, mathematical proportionality, linear movement, and the spatial possibilities of light. Consistent with the dual nature of his practice, the artist’s facility as a draftsman is evidenced in an array of works on paper from each series that run the gamut from still lifes to purely abstract drawings.

Al Taylor: Pass the Peas and Can Studys

Christopher Williams: Printed in Germany (red)

By Josef Albers. Foreword by Nicholas Fox Weber



The 50th anniversary edition of a classic text, featuring an expanded selection of color studies

“The landmark 1963 book by Josef Albers . . . isn’t just for aspiring artists. Its mesmerizing illustrations are a revelation for anyone interested in color theory and human perception.”—Pilar Viladas,

 is a masterwork in art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this influential book presents Albers’s singular explanation of complex color theory principles.

Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, 

 first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since. With over a quarter of a million copies sold in its various editions since 1963, 

 remains an essential resource on color, as pioneering today as when Albers created it.

Fifty years after 

’s initial publication, this anniversary edition presents a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds. A celebration of the longevity and unique authority of Albers’s contribution, this landmark edition will find new audiences in studios and classrooms around the world.

Josef Albers: Interaction of Color

In February 1943, the progressive newspaper PM hired Ad Reinhardt as its staff artist and, in January 1946, Reinhardt embarked on his most ambitious illustration project—the notable 

 series, in which his cartoons and collages transformed from small, supplemental illustrations, to complex, ironic, and pithy art-historical lessons always articulated with a keenly critical eye and a wry sense of humor that remains relevant today. 

In addition to showing Reinhardt’s complete 

 series, this catalogue, which was published on the occasion of the 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, also includes the artist’s ever-relevant biting, satirical critiques of the contemporary art world later published in such periodicals as 

. As Dan Nadel notes in his review of the exhibition, “Reinhardt winkingly guides viewers through art as he knew it. Along the way there are many now-forgotten artists, critics, curators and galleries, and many still known. But trace-the-reference is only part of the fun. The elegance of Reinhardt’s compositions, the deftness with which he juxtaposes text and image, and his infrequent, but jarring use of hand-drawn cartooning make each strip a gem.”

Introducing new scholarship on this facet of Reinhardt’s career by curator Robert Storr, the publication includes large, black-and-white plates of the artist’s art comics. Storr lists a handful of Reinhardt’s contemporaries who were, like the artist himself, successfully employed as illustrators in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, from Philip Guston to Saul Steinberg—but among them, he declares, only Reinhardt managed to “transform that bread-and-butter occupation into a full-fledged but at the same time separate dimension of his larger aesthetic enterprise.” From 

, printed with a telling disclaimer that the editors’ views “do not necessarily reflect those of the author of this page,” to 

, accompanied by passionate cautions against the danger of market obsession, these pages bring to life Reinhardt’s inimitable spirit for provocation and thoughtful critique. They exist as a testament to his legacy as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, and his comics continue to resonate as important examples of astute political, cultural, and social commentary.

Art Comics

Ad Reinhardt: How to Look

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Raymond Pettibon’s work embraces a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Rich in detail, his obsessively worked drawings take, as their point of departure, the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and the do-it-yourself aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement—but they have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary. His subjects have included political figures and historical events throughout the years and with mounting intensity since September 11, 2001.

Raymond Pettibon: Here’s Your Irony Back

 includes full-color, striking images of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, both Bush presidents, the Kennedys, Hitler, scenes from the Vietnam War and protest movements, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prisoner abuse of Abu Ghraib, President Obama, and Osama bin Laden. As artfully described by art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in his essay for the book, Pettibon’s works from this period engage the recurring tropes of the day, from caricature, sleaze, and pop, to graffiti and patriotism, engaging universal issues with a tone that is at turns desperate, hilarious, ironic, brutal, or tragic. Brought together here, the images in this book serve to capture the power and urgency of Pettibon’s original graphic endeavor.

Political Works 1975-2013

Raymond Pettibon: Here's Your Irony Back

Michael Darling

Jeffrey D. Grove

Lisa Lee

Stephanie Weber

Texts by Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, Lisa Lee, and Stephanie Weber

Isa Genzken is arguably one of the most important and influential female artists of the past 30 years, yet the breadth of her achievement–which spans sculptures, paintings, photographs, collages, drawings, artist’s books, films, installations, and public works–is still largely unknown in the United States. Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s epically diverse body of work, this publication encompasses Genzken’s work in all media over the past 40 years and is the most complete monograph on the artist available in English. Genzken has been part of the artistic discourse since she began exhibiting in the mid-1970s, but over the last decade a new generation of artists has been inspired by her radical inventiveness. The past ten years have been particularly productive for Genzken, who has created several bodies of work that have redefined assemblage for a new era. The catalogue presents Genzken’s career, through essays exploring the unfolding of her practice from 1973 until today, as well as an expansive plate section that provides a chronological overview of all her most important bodies of work and key exhibitions.

Isa Genzken: Retrospective

James Lawrence

Known for sculptures that outline planes and volumes in space using the humblest of materials, Fred Sandback (1943–2003) was an American artist whose work is informed by a minimalist artistic vocabulary. Though Sandback employed metal wire and elastic cord in his earliest works, the artist soon dispensed with these materials and began using acrylic yarn to create sculptures that produced perceptual illusions while addressing their physical surroundings—the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. Throughout the course of his career, yarn enabled the artist to elaborate on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity. 

 is the third in a series of illustrated hardcover monographs on the artist published by David Zwirner. Documenting the eponymous exhibition held at the gallery in 2012, this award-winning publication covers a selection of Sandback’s work dating from 1968 to 2008, thus spanning five decades of production. With ninety reproductions in color, this beautifully produced catalogue includes a fully illustrated chronology with selected biographical and bibliographical material, as well as new scholarship on Sandback by art historian James Lawrence.

Fred Sandback: Decades

Alain Kirili

Text by Bob Nickas. Interviews with the artist by Alain Kirili and Bob Nickas

 organized by Bob Nickas, on view at David Zwirner, New York (February 19 – March 23, 2013), this indispensable catalogue on Alan Uglow (1941-2011) includes all new photography of paintings created from the early 1990s through 2010, past interviews, archival images, and an exhibition chronology illustrated with images of museum and gallery invitation cards.

Uglow quickly gained a reputation as an “artist’s artist.” Working in series that evolved slowly over decades, he always remained faithful to his central vision and his practice was unaffected by the increasingly commercial demands of the art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. His paintings revolve around a subtle dialogue between notions of center and edge, and are executed gradually, with several layers of paint. They appear at once calm and dynamic, and simultaneously suggest emptiness and ground.

Alan Uglow

All Books

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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.