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

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The work of Thomas Ruff marks a paradigm change in photography: systematically and on an impressive level of aesthetic quality, the artist has for more than three decades been subjecting the medium of photography to a modernist analysis by introducing several formal innovations. One by one, Ruff has teased out basic parameters of the medium and their aesthetic interdependencies, taking photography beyond well-trodden paths. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that exhibitions and the literature to-date have tended to neglect these circumstances: up to now, the artist’s work has repeatedly been presented and discussed exclusively in terms of its content and media-critical aspects.

The present examination by collector Markus Kramer focuses instead for the first time on the unique pictorial vocabulary Ruff has developed, which with its powerful and complex aesthetic demonstrates—while consistently reflecting on its medium—how the use of photography can be freed from its traditional patterns of application.

Thomas Ruff: Modernism

Contributions by Thomas Weski and Okwui Enwezor

German photo artist Thomas Ruff is a master of conceptual serial photography. He made a name for himself in the early eighties with oversized, superrealistic color portraits of his artist friends and as a pioneer of the Diasec process used to mount photographic images onto acrylic glass, thereby obviating frames, liberating photography from the print gallery and paving the way to the "grand gallery" museum walls for large-format photos.

This collection presents selected works from Ruff's large-format series, beginning with his small Interiors, the large Portraits, his Architectural Photos, the Starry Skies, his abstract Substrata, the Nudes, which make use of pornographic material taken from the internet, and finally his latest creation: Stellar Landscapes.

The book features essays by Thomas Weski and Okwui Enwezor and was published in conjunction with an extensive retrospective exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Thomas Ruff: Works 1979-2011

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

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Life as Wolfgang sees it: Tillmans's latest project sets its sights on the world. 

Over the period of more than two decades, Wolfgang Tillmans has explored the medium of photo-imaging with greater range than any other artist of his generation. From snapshots of his friends to abstract images made in a darkroom without a camera or works made with a photocopier, he has pushed the photographic process to its outer limits in myriad ways. For this collection of photos Tillmans turned away from the self-reflexive exploration of the photography medium that had occupied him for several years by focusing his lens on the outside world—from London and Nottingham to Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Saudi Arabia, and Papua New Guinea. He describes this new phase simply as “trying out what the camera can do for me, what I can do for it.” The result is a powerful and singular view of life today in diverse parts of the world, seen from many angles. Says Tillmans, “My travels are aimless as such, not looking for predetermined results, but hoping to find subject matter that in some way or other speaks about the time I’m in.”

The book features a conversation between the artist and Beatrix Ruf, director of Kunsthalle Zurich. 

Wolfgang Tillmans: Neue Welt

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

Mamma Andersson, 2023. Photo by Pierre Björk

Text by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Dominic Molon, and Laura Hoptman

Swedish painter Mamma Andersson works between domestic interiors and the Nordic landscape, often layering imagery to create subtly haunting, dreamlike atmospheres. Drawing from a variety of sources—from the narrative suggestiveness of cinematic imagery to the physical space of theatrical sets—Andersson employs disjointed perspectives and mismatched spatial relationships to create an eerie sense of the otherworldly. Her palette is seductive yet muted, applied in both soft washes and thick brushstrokes, with blank areas sometimes left on the surface of the painting. Andersson's imagery often includes windows, reflections, and depictions of other paintings, to further destabilize the spaces she paints. This volume is published on the occasion of Andersson's first one-person U.S. museum show at the Aspen Art Museum and provides a broad overview of her work.

Mamma Andersson

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

Jeffrey Weiss

Texts by Jeffrey Weiss, Béatrice Gross, and Gila Strobel

This two-volume catalogue documents the collection of Helga and Walther Lauffs, one of Europe’s most important private collections of twentieth century post-war art, comprising key examples of Pop Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual Art.

The Lauffs built their collection over the course of the late 1960s through the 1970s with the guidance of curator and art historian Paul Wember, who was known for the visionary program of contemporary art that he developed as the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld between 1947 and 1975. In its vision and scope, which is made evident by the rigorous and broad selection of the art of their times, they succeeded in building a collection that bridges the gap between European and American artistic sensibilities. Their collection provides a singularly focused overview of art produced around the 1960s and 1970s, offering connections among its diverse artworks, while pointing forward to the work of successive generations of artists.

In two fully-illustrated volumes, the catalogue incorporates over 100 color plates, with newly-commissioned scholarship and extensive research and documentation on the works in the collection, including important works by Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Lee Bontecou, Christo, Joseph Cornell, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Piero Manzoni, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Fred Sandback, George Segal, Richard Serra, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Günther Uecker, Tom Wesselmann, and Douglas Wheeler, among other key artists of the twentieth century.

This clothbound, slipcased edition was published after a series of major exhibitions drawn from the Lauffs Collection in the Spring and Fall of 2008 at Zwirner & Wirth and David Zwirner, New York, and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.

The Helga and Walther Lauffs Collection

In 2007, Thomas Ruff completed his monumental 

 series in which he explored the distribution and reception of images in the digital age. Starting with images he culled primarily from the Web, Ruff enlarged them to a gigantic scale, which exaggerates the pixel patterns until they become sublime geometric displays of color. Many of Ruff’s works in the series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, and conversely, scenes of war, and nature disturbed by human manipulation. Taken together, these masterworks create an encyclopedic compendium of contemporary visual culture that also actively engages the history of landscape painting. A fittingly deluxe and oversized volume, 

 is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to the publication of Ruff’s remarkable series. Also included is an essay by Bennett Simpson, Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Thomas Ruff: jpegs

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

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

This fully illustrated catalogue was published on the occasion of the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2008. The exhibition presented new paintings by Rauch, which feature a colorful cast of characters, ranging from sturdy women workers to dandified men in topcoats. Amongst the works on view was the striking painting 

 (2008), which depicts a fallen painter with a noose tied from his neck to a blank canvas. Available in hardcover, this catalogue includes a text by art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné.

Neo Rauch

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

Klaus Kertess

Few artists's names can connote such diverse associations as the Virgin Mary, Rudolph Giuliani and elephant dung. Controversy tends to dog the art of Chris Ofili, and former New York Mayor Giuliani's suspension of funding for the Brooklyn Museum upon its exhibition of his 1996 painting 

 in 1999 was but one instance of the ire Ofili routinely arouses. When these occasional media commotions subside, one sees that the work is actually pleasing in more familiar ways: Ofili's surfaces sparkle with smears of glitter and bright veneer, resembling nothing so much as African icons. But Ofili has always been political, specifically in his confrontations with racial cliché, and in his insistent incorporation of materials from popular black culture. 

 derives its title from singer-songwriter D'Angelo's 1998 lyric meditation on temptation and retribution. According to the song, the ingredients of a devil's pie include "materialistic, greed and lust, jealousy, envious / bread and dough, cheddar cheese, flash and stash, cash and cream." Similarly diverse in its references and dichotomies, Ofili's work contains contradictions. This catalogue collects his work in sculpture, painting, printmaking, and graphite drawing for the first time and includes texts by art writer and curator Klaus Kertess and writer Cameron Shaw.

Chris Ofili: Devil's Pie

Edited by Alex Israel. Text by Kevin West

The installation and interactive performance 

 formed part of the artist’s “Pussy Trilogy,” which also encompassed 

 (2004). Evoking the style of the coffee table social diary, the catalogue documents the events, known as 

, held in the artist’s Los Angeles studio in 2006. Amidst the chrome trolleys, neon signs, dream catchers, cowboy hats, hookah pipes, and camel saddles which partially constitute the installation, guests were invited to contribute to Rhoades’s ongoing project of creating a cross-cultural compendium of euphemisms for female genitalia. Evolving to fit each location, the installation debuted at Hauser & Wirth in 2005 and traveled to David Zwirner in 2007. The catalogue, conceived by and designed in conjunction with the artist, includes a foreword by Kevin West, West Coast editor of 

 magazine, as well as photographs by Joshua White and Alexia Pilat.

Jason Rhoades’ Black Pussy Cocktail Coffee Table Book

Edited by Fabrizio Tramontano. Essays by Giovanni Leoni, Giancarlo Cosenza, and Luigi Cosenza. Introduction by Giancarlo Cosenza

Shortly after graduating in Bridge and Road Engineering in 1929 and being appointed to the rank of reserve lieutenant, I took a look around my city. There were no patterns to follow—only examples to imitate. The grand extravagant projects were the monopoly of the regime of arrogance and favoritism. A modern fish market was needed to replace the grubby “pietra del pesce" on Via Marina. I studied the problem on the spot and visited various other fish markets in Pozzuoli, Milan, Venice, Marseilles, Ostend, and Hamburg.

This is how Luigi Cosenza (Naples, 1905–1984) describes the genesis of his first project, the Mercato del pesce di Napoli (Fish Market of Naples), built in 1929 and considered the manifesto of the city's rational architecture. This book documents the "M.D.P.N." building in equally rational and elegant images from Germany's renowned Thomas Ruff, beginning with photographs taken in the dazzling light of an early afternoon in September 2002.

Thomas Ruff: m.d.p.n.

Hans van Heirseele

 was published on the occasion of the artist’s second solo 

 at David Zwirner in 2006. Amongst the fourteen new paintings on view was the eponymous work 

 (2005), which portrays a young man, fashionably attired, holding two twigs from each of his nostrils. Available in hardcover, this catalogue includes a text by Belgian artist and curator Hans van Heirseele.

Michaël Borremans: Horse Hunting

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

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