John Ruskin

Robert Hewison

ekphrasis

By John Ruskin. Introduction by Robert Hewison

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

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

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

Long out of print, the Arundel Society first published 

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

Giotto and His Works in Padua

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

Texts by Jacqueline Francis, Catharina Manchanda, and Lowery Stokes Sims

Contemporary artists Robert Colescott (1925–2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) are distinguished by their attention to a history of representation, which they re-visit and revise to reflect on individual and collective Black experience. Equally engaged with social and political histories, and the history of art, Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas have created works that at times poignantly and satirically critique dominant narratives and posit alternatives. By considering these artists together, this thought-provoking book expands our understanding of contemporary history painting, a genre first defined during the 17th century and known for didactic paintings that often depicted Biblical or mythological subjects, and expressed the tastes and narratives of a ruling class. Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas marry appreciation of these traditional forms of representation to a deep understanding of contemporary American culture to create insightful works that disrupt historic narratives and read canonic art history against the grain.

Out of stock

Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas

David Breslin

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political.

Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist's career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017. The interplay with the specific architecture of the gallery and the way works are installed is highlighted throughout the catalogue, with images that explore the poetics of how space and work influence each other. Together, in their radical openness to interventions of site, audience, and context, the works on view challenge perceived notions of what constitutes an exhibition space, a public, an artwork itself. Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his work, Gonzalez-Torres worked with familiar materials, from his iconic candy spill works and his evocative light string pieces, but also including mirrors, clocks, and curtains. His work activates the architecture of the various spaces, the physicality of the viewer, the past and present, continuously maintaining its relevance.

Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece. New text by David Breslin explores the variety of works included here while contextualizing Gonzalez-Torres's contribution to art history.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Donald Shambroom

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

 offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.

Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.

Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades?

A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, 

 is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Duchamp's Last Day 

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

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

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

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

Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

Richard Shiff

Robert Storr

David Zwirner

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

Published on the occasion of the twenty-five year anniversary of David Zwirner, this book paints a picture of the gallery’s growth and development through the lens of the artists that have shaped it.

Since its founding in 1993, David Zwirner has above all else been guided by its artist-centric ethos. Beginning with the gallery's early days on Greens Street in SoHo, to its transition and expansion to Chelsea, London, the Upper East Side, and Hong Kong, this book captures David Zwirner's devotion to its inimitable roster of artists and estates.

The heart of the publication is a wide-ranging, dynamic selection of the gallery's standout exhibitions—in many cases handpicked by David Zwirner himself. Many of these exhibitions highlight the countless works that ended up in major museum and private collections around the world. Also featured is an extensive gallery history that details all of the exhibitions by every artist and estate presented at David Zwirner, accompanied by archival imagery.

With contributions by Richard Shiff and Robert Storr, as well as a foreword by David Zwirner, this publication offers rare insights into the growth of a commercial gallery through its long-term commitment to artists.

David Zwirner: 25 Years

Mark Wigley

By Mark Wigley. Contributions by Gordon Matta-Clark.

Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation 

is a detective story. It relentlessly pursues the legendary but invisible Anarchitecture Group show and Gordon Matta-Clark’s celebrated, hyper-visible, yet equally misunderstood building cuts. Of all the shows at the fabled 112 Greene Street space—an epicenter of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1970s—the Anarchitecture Group show of March 1974 is a constant reference point in discussion, despite the almost complete lack of evidence about it. It has become a foundational myth. Gordon Matta-Clark was supposedly the ringleader of an extended series of meetings with fellow artists that operated as a kind of collective research seminar challenging all conventional understandings of architecture. The meetings of this so-called Anarchitecture Group culminated in the exhibition as an anonymous statement in unlabeled photographs. But did it actually happen? It exists only through oblique archival traces and the conflicting memories of the participants. An unprecedented dossier of unpublished archival evidence is assembled here and subjected to ever deeper forensic analysis—cutting into both the concepts and the cuts to see what the elusive, mysterious, seductive, yet viral word Anarchitecture offers us today.

Contains interviews with Tina Girouard, Jene Highstein, Dickie Landry, Jeffrey Lew, Richard Nonas, Bernard Kirschenbaum, and Susan Weil Kirschenbaum.

Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation

Bertold Brecht

David Crowley

Deeply political and historical, Christopher Williams’ photographs evoke a subtle shift in our perception by questioning the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality. Deploying a style of photography that references multiple sources and precedents, including the carefully composed and well-lit images of the 1920s New Objectivity movement, the photo-conceptualism that he encountered as a student at CalArts in the 1970s, and the advertisement industry, Williams creates layered works that critically, but also playfully, reveal the conditions of the medium in post-industrial society.

Each of the two volumes in this slipcased publication by Christopher Williams (born 1956) comprises an identical image sequence, but each contains a different text: the first volume includes Brecht's 

, and the second David Crowley's essay "Applied Fantastic: On the Polish Women’s Magazine Ty I Ja."

Christopher Williams: Normative Models

Texts by Valérie Rousseau and Debra Purden

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

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

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

Bill Traylor

Text by Leslie Umberger. Foreword by Stephanie Stebich. Introduction by Kerry James Marshall

A major new look at the work of one of America’s foremost self-taught artists.

Bill Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) came to art-making on his own and found his creative voice without guidance; today he is remembered as a renowned American artist. Traylor was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation, and his experiences spanned multiple worlds—black and white, rural and urban, old and new—as well as the crucibles that indelibly shaped America—the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. 

 presents an unparalleled look at the work of this enigmatic and dazzling artist, who blended common imagery with arcane symbolism, narration with abstraction, and personal vision with the beliefs and folkways of his time.

Traylor was about twelve when the Civil War ended. After six more decades of farm labor, he moved, aging and alone, into segregated Montgomery. In the last years of his life, he drew and painted works depicting plantation memories and the rising world of African American culture. Upon his death he left behind over a thousand pieces of art. 

 convenes 205 of his most powerful creations, including a number that have been previously unpublished. This beautiful and carefully researched book assesses Traylor’s biography and stylistic development, and for the first time interprets his scenes as ongoing narratives, conveying enduring, interrelated themes.

 reveals one man’s visual record of African American life as a window into the overarching story of his nation.

Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor

Texts by Ann Coxon, Briony Fer and Maria Müller-Schareck. Contributions by Brenda Danilowitz, Magdalena Droste, Nicholas Fox Weber, María Minera, Priyesh Mistry, Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, and T'ai Smith

A long-overdue reassessment of one of the most important and influential woman artists working at midcentury.

Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a German textile designer, weaver, and printmaker, and among the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism. Although she has heavily influenced generations of artists and designers, her contribution to modernist art history has been comparatively overlooked, especially in relation to that of her husband, Josef. In this groundbreaking and beautifully illustrated volume, Albers’s most important works are examined to fully explore and redefine her contribution to 20th-century art and design and highlight her significance as an artist in her own right.

Featured works—from her early activity at the Bauhaus as well as from her time at Black Mountain College, and spanning her entire fruitful career—include wall hangings, designs for commercial use, drawings and studies, jewelry, and prints. Essays by international experts focus on key works and themes, relate aspects of Albers’s practice to her seminal texts 

, and identify broader contextual material, including examples of the Andean textiles that Albers collected and in which she found inspiration for her understanding of woven thread as a form of language. Illuminating Albers’s skill as a weaver, her material awareness, and her deep understanding of art and design, this publication celebrates an artist of enormous importance and showcases the timeless nature of her creativity.

Anni Albers

Hillary Chute

By Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Foreword by Hillary Chute

The early work of the pioneering feminist cartoonist plus her acclaimed new story "Dream House".

Aline Kominsky-Crumb immediately made her mark in the Bay Area’s underground comix scene with unabashedly raw, dirty, unfiltered comics chronicling the thoughts and desires of a woman coming of age in the 60s. Kominsky-Crumb didn’t worry about self-flattery. In fact, her darkest secrets and deepest insecurities were all the more fodder for groundbreaking stories. Her exaggerated comix alter-ego, Bunch, is self-destructive and grotesque but crackles with the self-deprecating humor and honesty of a cartoonist confident in the story she wants to tell.

Collecting comics from the 1970s through today, 

 is shockingly prescient while still being an authentic story of its era. Kominsky-Crumb was ahead of her time in juxtaposing the contradictory nature of female sexuality with a proud, complicated feminism. Most importantly, she does so without apology.

Kominsky-Crumb traces her steps from a Beatles loving fangirl, East Village groupie, an adult grappling with her childhood, an 80s housewife and mother, to a new thirty-page story "Dream House" that looks back on her childhood, forty years later. One of the most famous and idiosyncratic cartoonists of our times, 

 will be Kominsky-Crumb’s only solo-authored book in print. Originally published as a book in 1990, this new expanded edition follows Kominsky-Crumb to the present, including a foreword penned by noted comics scholar Hillary Chute.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb: Love That Bunch

Michael Rooks

Allegra Pesenti

Lawrence Rinder

Randall Suffolk

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

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

Al Taylor: What Are You Looking At?

Foreword by Bartomeu Marí. Texts by Kim Inhye, Oh Gwangsu, Kim Hyunsook, and Choi Jongtae

This catalogue is published with an exhibition of work by Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. One of the leading figures of the Dansaekhwa art movement, Yun’s paintings are inspired by nature, combining a palette of umber and ultramarine (the colors of earth and water) to create rectilinear compositions which are reminiscent of traditional ink-wash paintings. The investigation into flatness, materiality, and meditation in art-making is a consistent focus of his work, and his paintings characterize the elements of tactility, spirituality, and performance common to first-generation Dansaekwha artists.

Yun Hyong-keun (MMCA)

Jarrett Earnest

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

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

Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, 

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

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

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

Interviews with Art Critics

What it Means to Write About Art 

Langston Hughes

Sherry Turner DeCarava

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (hardcover)

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (softcover)

Christian Viveros-Fauné

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

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

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art

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

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

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

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


Never professing to be a definitive history of political art, 

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

Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art 

Alison Gingeras

Texts by Fernando Francés and Alison Gingera

The CAC Málaga presents the first exhibition in Spain by Rose Wylie. 

, curated by Fernando Francés, brings together twenty-nine works by the English artist, some of them being shown for the first time. Wylie, born in the 1930s, surprises and captivates us with the energy, vivacity, and freshness of her work. Her creativity is channelled through her impressions and her memory. On occasions, Wylie leaves aside her brushes to paint directly on the canvas with her hands, taking inspiration from different sources, including history, film, comics, the news, anecdotes, celebrities, and sports.

Rose Wylie: Hullo Hullo...

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Victor Wang

Spotlight Series

The Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo is known for an inventive practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled.

In recent years, Murillo has traveled extensively throughout the world to research and prepare exhibitions and other projects, making works both in the studio and in unexpected locations. As a result, airplanes, which are able to move more or less freely and without regard for borders, and the contemplative isolation afforded by these long journeys, have become an important site of production for the artist. His large-scale canvases, in turn, are a synthesis in both form and content of his experiences. By combining personal allusions with more universally recognizable references, Murillo aligns these paintings with preceding art-historical movements that conceptualized art not as a hermetic language but rather as a critical tool for interpreting a world outside of itself—comprising, as he notes, “an accumulation of thought, gesture, discourse, action, and motion.”

Through his command of gesture, form, and spatial organization, Murillo is able to convey a complex and nuanced understanding of the specific conditions of globalization and its attendant state of flux, while nevertheless maintaining the universality of human experience within this milieu. Published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition of paintings and works on paper at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2018, 

 is accompanied by an essay by curator and writer Victor Wang, who attests to Murillo’s work as being guided by mobility. This publication is available in both 

 and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

Oscar Murillo: the build-up of content and information (Bilingual)

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

Portrait of Michaël Borremans. Photo by Pascal Gamarte

Michael Bracewell

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

 highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence.

Known for his ability to recall classical painting, both through technical mastery and subject matter, Borremans’s depiction of the uncanny, the perhaps secret, the bizarre, often surprises, sometimes disturbs the viewer. In this series of work, children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work. Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness.

In his accompanying essay, critic and curator Michael Bracewell takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium. He writes, “The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics—accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication is available in both 

 and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun (Bilingual)

In his accompanying essay, critic and curator Michael Bracewell takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium. He writes, “The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics—accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication is available in both English-only and 

Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun

Texts by Daniel Garza Usabiaga and Federica Zanco. Conversation with Roger Duffy, Amavong Panya, and Lilian Tone by Edward Vazquez

In 2016, sculptures by Fred Sandback (1943–2003) were installed in the Casa Luis Barragán, the Casa Antonio Gálvez, Cuadra San Cristóbal, and the Casa Gilardi of Luis Barragán (1902–1988). The American minimalist and the Pritzker Prize-winning Mexican architect share a common interest in the properties of light and color; the remarkable interplay between their works, documented in photographs, is presented for the first time in this publication, with essays by Barragán Foundation Director Federica Zanco and curator Daniel Garza Usabiaga, as well as a conversation between architect Roger Duffy, artist Amavong Panya, curator Lilian Tone, and author Edward Vazquez.

Luis Barragán/Fred Sandback: The Properties of Light

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

In 2017, Chris Ofili photographed chain-link fences throughout the island of Trinidad in order to explore notions of beauty, community, liberation, and constraint. This series of arresting images—“pocket photography,” as described by the artist—is the first body of photography ever published by Ofili. Through these entrancing black-and-white photographs, the artist engages with the diverse sources that inspired his critically acclaimed 

 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017.

Since moving to Trinidad in 2005, Ofili has continued to engage with the surrounding environment and culture, which has found its way into many of his colorful paintings. In these deceivingly simple black-and-white photographs, he captures a wide cross section of Trinidad as he highlights the encounter between natural and man-made settings, and the different aesthetic possibilities each brings out in the other. In focusing on a ubiquitous and seemingly unremarkable piece of equipment, Ofili is able to comment on our interactions with space and each other, using a near-universal subject as the fence slices the sky, melds into a tree, frames a basketball game, or reveals an opening.

In a new essay by the critically acclaimed author of 

Island People: The Caribbean and the World

 (2016), Joshua Jelly-Schapiro charts the history of chain-link fences; focusing on a selection of Ofili’s photographs, he then begins to explore what this imagery tells us about Trinidad in particular and the Caribbean as a whole. These two essays—one visual, the other literary—open onto a whole new set of interpretive possibilities for this groundbreaking artist.

Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost 

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.