Robert Storr

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

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

Bob Nickas

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

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

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

Christine Kintisch

Belgian artist Michaël Borremans (born 1963) is among the most brilliant painters of emotion of the past half-century. An heir to the sober, enigmatic character studies of Manet and Velazquez and the thick indoor atmospheres of Vermeer, Borremans has greatly advanced this tradition, in part through his incorporation of cinematic allusion and of that uniquely Belgian take on Surrealism that is at once deeply phlegmatic and bizarrely comical. Any divisions between realism and flights of fantasy are mysteriously abolished by Borremans, however, leaving the viewer to confront his intense, almost claustrophobic painterly world. Published for an exhibition at BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna, 

 presents a concise selection of a dozen canvases made over the past five years, examined in dialogue with the artist’s drawings and films.

Michaël Borremans: Magnetics

An installation by Huma Bhabha, titled We Come in Peace, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dated 2017.

Text by Thomas McEvilley and Julie Mehretu


Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Huma Bhabha (born 1962) makes fragile sculptures and assemblages composed from detritus, construction materials and found objects. This first survey of her work contains a wealth of full-color illustrations, an interview with Julie Mehretu and an essay by Thomas McEvilley.

Huma Bhabha

Robert Graham

 brings together rarely seen works by this American artist, providing an overview and reconsideration of Graham’s initial engagement with Minimalism and figurative sculpture. The exhibition, held at David Zwirner in 2011, comprised one of the first major presentations of the artist’s early work in the United States since 1972. Modeled after images found on television or in popular magazines, such as 

, Graham’s early work presents Plexiglas-encased environments populated by miniature wax figurines engaged in leisurely or pleasurable activities. The ethereal surfaces of the artist’s plastic enclosures are evocative of the highly finished and meticulous objects that have become associated with the so-called “Finish Fetish” aesthetic, and their interior spaces are suggestive of the geography of 1960s California as well as the modernist domestic interiors popularized by John Entenza’s Case Study House Program. Over the course of his career, Graham went on to develop an exceptionally focused artistic practice characterized by a consistent preoccupation with scale and the human figure. Since the early 1970s, his works have been exhibited widely, at such venues as Kunstverein Hamburg, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Work by the artist is held in major museum collections around the world, and Graham has also received numerous public commissions, including the 1984 Olympic Gateway in Los Angeles and the Duke Ellington Memorial in Central Park, New York (1997). Born in Mexico City in 1938, he died in Santa Monica, California, in 2008.

Robert Graham: Early Work 1963-1973

, is published on the occasion of the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2011. The exhibition debuts a major new film, 

, alongside related drawings, sculptures, and dioramas. In the film, characters based on the classic game of chess, dressed in geometrically designed costumes and wearing elaborate masks, dance across a checkered board to challenge their opponents in fatal interchanges. Designed in collaboration with the artist in the format of a small sketchbook, this exhibition catalogue includes drawings, storyboards, dioramas, and film and production stills from the making of 

Marcel Dzama: Behind Every Curtain

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

Afterword by Doon Arbus. Edited by Doon Arbus and Yolanda Cuomo

 is the only volume of Diane Arbus\s photographs devoted exclusively to a single project. The photographs were taken at residences for people with developmental disabilities between 1969 and 1971, in the last years of Arbus’s life. Although she considered doing a book on the subject, the vast majority of these pictures remained unpublished prior to this volume. These photographs achieve a lyricism, an emotional purity that sets them apart from all her other accomplishments. “Finally what I’ve been searching for,” she wrote at the time. The product of her consistently unflinching regard for reality as she found it, the images in this book have less in common with the documentary than with the mythic. 

 may well be Arbus’s most transcendent, most romantic vision. It is a celebration of the singularity and connectedness of each and every one of us. For Diane Arbus, this is what making pictures was all about. This is the first edition in which the image separations were created digitally; the files have been specially prepared by Robert J. Hennessey using prints by Neil Selkirk.

Diane Arbus: Untitled

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of 48, she was already a significant influence—even a legend—among serious photographers, although only a small number of her pictures were widely known. The publication of 

 in 1972, and the posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, offered the public its first encounter with Arbus’s achievements. The response was unprecedented.

The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal was to remain faithful to the standards by which Arbus judged her own work, and to how she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a timeless masterpiece, and translated into five languages, 

 remains the foundation of her international reputation.

Nearly fifty years has not diminished the impact of these pictures; they penetrate the psyche with the force of a personal encounter, and transform the way we see the world.

Fortieth-anniversary edition

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

Jeff Koons

 paintings, including an extensive interview with the artist in his studio.

From the outset of his controversial career, Jeff Koons turned the traditional notion of the work of art and its context inside out. Focusing on unexpected yet banal objects as models for his work, he eschewed typical standards of "good taste" in art, instead embracing what he perceives as conventional middle-class values in order to expose the vulnerabilities of aesthetic hierarchies and value systems. Koons’s declared strategies are to make art beautiful, to strive for objectivity, to give back the familiar, and to reflect, and thus empower, the viewer. The works of Koons’s series Hulk Elvis burst with energy and precision yet mystify with their complex permutations and combinations of figurative and abstract elements. A charged mix of inflatable monkeys, geishas, birds, the Incredible Hulk, and the Liberty Bell jostle against realistically rendered landscapes, gestural paintings, steam engines and horse-drawn carriages, negative silhouettes, and underlying dot screens.

Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

David Adjaye

Carol Becker

Peter Doig

Okwui Enwezor

Thelma Golden

Cameron Shaw

Kara Walker

Forward by Peter Doig. Texts by David Adjaye, Carol Becker, Okwui Enwezor, Cameron Shaw, and Kara Walker. Interview with the artist by Thelma Golden

Chris Ofili’s intricately constructed works, combining beadlike dots of paint, collaged images from popular media, and elephant dung, create a unique iconography that marries African artistic and ritual practices with Western art historical traditions and contemporary hip-hop culture. This beautifully designed book, made in close collaboration with the artist, is the first to examine Ofili’s artistic development and surveys his work in watercolor, graphite drawing, and sculpture. Literary and historical parallels from a formidable list of contributors explore the ways through which the artist has grasped his times with a palpable sense of history.

Chris Ofili

John McCracken Sketchbook

Bruce Hainley

Laura Hoptman

Jan Verwoert

Texts by Bruce Hainley, Laura Hoptman, and Jan Verwoert

Each Tomma Abts painting is the result of an intuitive process, a complex operation of addition and subtraction. Within rigid parameters – unvarying materials and size – she conjures a progression of shapes and colors, building layer upon layer of seemingly spontaneous geometry until the work reaches its culmination: an abstract arrangement in perfect tension.

This volume, the artist’s first extensive monograph, provides a comprehensive survey of her work, with full-color images of thirty-seven paintings and eighteen drawings, as well as three specially commissioned essays. In the first essay, Laura Hoptman dismantles abstraction’s historical framework to illustrate the uniqueness of Abts’s approach. Jan Verwoert mediates on the subversive power of contemplation, finding in Abts’s artistic process a validation of “the beauty of latency.” And Bruce Hainley gazes at Abts’s work through the fictional eyes of Margit Carstensen – actress, muse, and star of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 

Tomma Abts

One of the seminal artists of contemporary photography, Philip-Lorca diCorcia produces work that exists on a wide spectrum of fictionalized documentary. Yet a thematic and conceptual unity, most often realized in serial form and particularly suited to monograph format marks each series in his oeuvre.

, diCorcia effectively inverts his own tendency: the monograph is now the work itself. The sheer volume of material, which spans over 20 years of personal and artistic creation, shifts notions of context, narrative, and individual perception.
Flipping through the pages of 

 is not so much a retrospective or summation of the artist's life as it is an exercise in the construction of memory. An unwashed pan soaking in the sink precedes an unknown woman resembling an odalisque; the familiar linoleum aisles of a generic supermarket give way to a verdant swatch of lawn. These images are bothalien and deeply familiar, and just as one moment in our lives may recall another, these photos echo among one another, within the book, within the canon of diCorcia's work, and within our personal experience. The Polaroid proves to be the perfect souvenir unique and subject to reinterpretation, like memory itself.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Thousand

Detail of an oil on linen painting, titled Clear Message, dated 2019.

Interview with the artist by Sophie Aschauer

The work of American artist Josh Smith focuses on themes authenticity and authorship. His paintings, collages, artist books and installations encircle the central myths of modern painting, and connect subjectivities to the exterior world. Josh Smith first became known for his “Name Paintings”, in which his everyman name functions as a pictorial motif for variations—of the painting and signature in one. This publication presents, in two volumes, the artist’s “Abstract Paintings” next to his “Palette Paintings”. Two concepts, two themes, two books: on the one hand, archetypes of abstract-expressionist paintings with airy compositions in lively colors; on the other, canvases onto which Smith squeezes out his paintbrush, with the straightforward aesthetic of simple forms. Both books show how serious reflection can emerge from an aggressive-ironic approach. And how abstract art can emerge out of the ideal, without the need for pathos, artistic genius or over-appreciation of the individual painting. The additional text booklet contains an interview with Sophie Aschauer that broaches these questions, alongside installation views and the “Announcement Paintings” made for 

Josh Smith: Abstraction

Text by Pamela M. Lee. Interview with Fred Sandback by Kimberly Davenport

 was published on the occasion of concurrent exhibitions featuring the artist’s sculptures and drawings at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth, New York, in 2006-2007. This extensive monograph presents Sandback’s work from the 1960s and 70s, including a selection of his earliest sculptures made with metal and elastic cord, wall reliefs, and large-scale sculptures as well as a rare group of the artist’s Conceptual Constructions from 1969, which are sculptures of typed text. It also includes an extensive selection of drawings spanning four decades of the artist’s career. Comprising 58 plates, this fully illustrated catalogue includes an essay by art historian Pamela M. Lee and an interview with the artist by curator Kimberly Davenport.

Fred Sandback

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

Gerrit Vermeiren

 at David Zwirner in New York, this catalogue was designed by the artist. Featured are ten paintings, many now considered iconic works and in the collections of major museums, which offer a critique of America by laying claim to real events, suppressed memories, and political issues. For Tuymans, each painting presents a fragmented glimpse of a disjointed whole; his aim is to make the audience consider each image, the opposite of each image, and the uncertainty that follows. The exhibition’s title, 

, is in itself an aberration. While it refers to a seemingly requisite order determined by society at large, it simultaneously suggests the opposite – 

– and therefore subverts the notion of correctness as it relates to social and societal expectations.

In a key painting, we are confronted by the cropped, larger-than-life-sized face of Condoleeza Rice. Prompted by a remark made by a Belgian official, in which Rice was described as “strong; not unpretty,” Tuymans’s portrait of the former United States Secretary of State forces us to reevaluate a known public figure within the parameters of the still image. In 

a perfectly-arranged dinner table evokes early Americana. In 

, the image of an empty dance hall underscores a lack of festivity – mediocrity tempered by the absence of dancing – and in 

a single couple sways over the state seal of Texas at the Governor’s Ball. In other paintings, it is the sense that something has just happened, or is about to, that suggests a fragile or ephemeral state – the eerie face of a Medieval statue; the dust cloud following the demolition of a building, with a New York City street lamp barely visible; an oval mirror reflecting a solitary lamp; the top of a canopy bed in which the cropped composition is eerily reminiscent of the water line from a flood. In the painting entitled 

, we are reminded by a tiny red light that, at any moment, things can go terribly wrong – or, at the very least, that change is inevitable.

Luc Tuymans: Proper

A painting by On Kawara, titled MAY 11, 1967, dated 1967.

On Kawara, One Million Years (Past), 1970-1971, Page 2001

Shiuji Inomata

Jean-Luc Nancy

Osho

Texts by Shiuji Inomata, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Osho

 was published on the occasion of the artist’s third solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2004, which presented a selection of date paintings, one from each of the past forty years. Also known as the 

 series, the artist began making his now signature date paintings in New York City on January 4, 1966. Available in hardcover, this catalogue includes texts by Japanese scientist Shiuji Inomata; French philosopher Jean Luc-Nancy; and Indian spiritual leader Osho.

On Kawara: Paintings of 40 Years

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

Texts by Francis Alÿs, Lynne Cooke, Alejandro Diaz, Tom Eccles, Dario Gamboni, RoseLee Goldberg, Laurence Kardish, Harper Montgomery, and Francesco Pellizzi

, marked the temporary move of The Museum of Modern Art from Manhattan to Queens in 2002. Presented by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the museum, it was a public parade involving over 100 participants who carried reproductions of some of the museum’s masterpieces and a living representative of contemporary art, Kiki Smith. This hardcover catalogue features extensive photographic documentation of the event as well as contributions and essays by the artist; the then Public Art Fund director Tom Eccles; curator Lynne Cook, among others.

Francis Alÿs: The Modern Procession

Frank Moore

Frank Moore: Between Life and Death, Twin Palms Publishers, 2002

In 1977 Frank Moore took a freighter from Montreal to Santander, Spain. He traveled through Spain, France, and Morocco, finally settling in Paris, where he obtained a residency in the Cité des Arts. Upon his return to New York, Moore began a decade-long involvement with modern dance, theater, film, and video that paralleled his development as a painter. The increasing devastation of the AIDS crisis through the eighties profoundly and irrevocably transformed his life and work. His work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Albright Knox Art Gallery.

Frank Moore: Between Life and Death

John Szarkowski

 was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the 

 contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes, and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis—an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of 

, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

William Eggleston's Guide

Philippe Pirotte

 at David Zwirner in New York, this catalogue documents Luc Tuymans’s fourth solo show at the gallery. After its showing in New York, the artist expanded this body of work to exhibit at the Belgium Pavilion of the 2001 Venice Biennale, where he was chosen to represent his country.

 examines the colonial history of Belgium, by focusing on the colonization of Zaire, previously known as the Belgian Congo. In his 1999 book entitled 

De moord op Lumumba (The death of Lumumba),

 Ludo de Witte makes the allegation that various institutions, including the Belgian government, were responsible for the 1961 murder of the Congo’s first legally elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, shortly after gaining independence. As a result of this publication, the “Lumumba Commission” was set up to investigate the matter further.

The exhibition’s title refers to the derogatory nickname 

, i.e. beautiful boy, which was given to Belgian’s young King Baudoin by the Congolese, and which was promptly changed by the Congolese authorities to the more respectful and authoritative 

, i.e. beautiful, noble man. The painting entitled 

 is a life-size portrait of the 24-year old Baudouin in a crisp white suit, arriving for the first time in the Congo for a four-week triumphant procession in 1955. The authority suggested by Baudoin’s uniform and his medals is contradicted by the featureless youthful face of the king, and his awkward and uncomfortable pose.

Here Tuymans explores a politically charged subject matter by employing a subtle and remote realization of specific events and people. Although the subject matter in this work refers specifically to regional history, the artist’s choice of paintings for this group of work invites parallels to recent American history. The racial divide apparent in the United States, reverberates throughout this body of work.

Beautiful White Man

Luc Tuymans: Mwana Kitoko

Bruce Wagner

Born and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee, William Eggleston began taking pictures during the 1960s after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 

. In 1966 he changed from black-and-white to color film, perhaps to make the medium more his own and less that of his esteemed predecessor. John Sarkowski, when he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, called Eggleston the ‘first color photographer,’ and the world in which we consider a color photograph as art has changed because of him.

William Eggleston: 2¼

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.