These four children’s books introduce young readers to the creative life, telling stories in a colorful, engaging, and age-appropriate way. Blending vivid illustrations with clear, accessible language, the series invites children to discover how art is made and who makes it.

series of lift-the-flap books, geared toward children under the age of three, shares the different ways artists Yayoi Kusama and Ruth Asawa view the world.

 series highlights a diverse group of artists and art workers, inviting young readers to explore creative ideas and discover the boundless possibilities of self-expression both in the classroom and beyond.

Children’s Books (4 Book Set)

The two titles in the William Eggleston Collection honor the artist’s trailblazing role in the field of color photography and his lasting impact on contemporary visual culture.

, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s lens.

 catalogues the last major group of William Eggleston’s photographs to ever be produced using the dye-transfer method, the format in which he originally presented his work.

William Eggleston Collection

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

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

The Ruth Asawa Collection honors the work and legacy of the American artist, educator, and arts advocate. These three meticulously designed volumes trace her extensive body of work—from her iconic wire sculptures to her works on paper—while situating her within postwar American art and highlighting her lifelong commitment to bringing art into the everyday.

 brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper, and more, demonstrating the centrality of Asawa’s innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the twentieth century.

Revealing rarely seen work alongside her iconic looped-wire sculptures, 

 celebrates Asawa’s unique vision and intimate subject matter. The catalogue is a document of the breathtaking and surprising eponymous exhibition organized by Helen Molesworth.

 is a welcome reminder to find inspiration in the everyday object. The delicate works featured in the artist’s first Artist Journal beckon the inner artist to carve out time to look and create.

Ruth Asawa Collection

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

This two-volume collection offers an unparalleled view of Diane Arbus, one of the most original and significant artists of the twentieth century. Together, the books examine her groundbreaking portraits across the breadth of humanity, underscoring the depth, rigor, and complexity of her vision alongside the rich archive of critical conversations it sparked.

 brings together forty-four photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, demonstrating the artist’s singular ability to enter private worlds.

 offers an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, charting the reception of the photographer’s work and providing comprehensive insight into the critical conversations, as well as misconceptions, around this highly influential artist.

Diane Arbus Collection

ekphrasis

The ekphrasis Collection (31 books), David Zwirner Books

 series, updated to included the recently published 

, is available now as a bundle of our 31 in-print titles. The 

 series is dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes. It is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.

The ekphrasis Collection (31 books)

Discover the incandescent work of American abstract artist Joan Mitchell with this book bundle, featuring in-depth explorations of her bold paintings and lyrical compositions.

 focuses on the years 1979 to 1985—a significant and deeply generative period within Mitchell’s decades-long career.



Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me

 spotlights Mitchell’s large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Joan Mitchell Collection

A portrait of Gerhard Richter by Werner Bartsch.

Photograph of Gerhard Richter collection books, published by David Zwirner Books

The Gerhard Richter Collection offers an in-depth look at recent work by one of the world’s most influential artists. Spanning painting, abstraction, and image-based experimentation, these titles celebrate Richter’s ongoing innovation and his mastery of complex, often highly technical processes. Together they provide a compelling portrait of an artist whose practice remains as rigorous, exploratory, and boundary-defying today as ever.

presents a suite of works on paper from 2023 that encapsulates and refines the fundamental principles that have consistently defined Richter’s artistic journey. Reproduced at actual size, the drawings encourage in-depth observation and inspire a compelling reimagining of abstraction.

 explores abstraction and chance in art and writing. An artwork of its own, this intimate volume inspires both close looking and a beautiful interpretation of abstraction.

presents Richter’s last paintings along with his recent explorations in drawing, printing, and sculpture.

Gerhard Richter Collection, David Zwirner Books

Gerhard Richter Collection

Portraits. Luc Tuymans

Elaine Scarry

Acclaimed theorist and scholar Elaine Scarry uncovers profound connections between color and our intuitions about mind, spirit, and the immortal through readings of works by Proust, Woolf, and Murasaki, offering fresh insights into the interplay between language and the mysterious image-making power of the mind.

How do writers summon color into being—not only in the worlds they depict, but in the minds of their readers? Unlike the visual arts, literature has no physical medium; its images instead emerge on the reader’s mental retina. In this new commission from David Zwirner Books, Elaine Scarry blends literary analysis with contemporary neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy to investigate this phenomenon of imagining color.

Through close readings of texts by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Lady Murasaki, and the medieval Pearl poet, Scarry explores how the brain conjures hues and sensations without the eye encountering actual pigment or light. Drawing from classic experiments on imagination, Scarry reveals the surprising ways literature triggers quasi-physical responses, as words transform into vivid, sensorial experiences.

 series’ exploration of how language gives form to visual experience, showing that literary description can summon colors and images in the mind’s eye.

Imagining Color: Elaine Scarry, front cover

Imagining Color

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

Contributions by Shanay Jhaveri and Émilie Bouvard. Conversations with Huma Bhabha, Mona Hatoum, and Lynda Benglis. 

Published to accompany the Encounters exhibition series held at the Barbican, London that positioned historic sculptures by Alberto Giacometti with new works by contemporary artists

One of the most significant European sculptors of the 20th century, Giacometti is known for his distinctive, elongated sculptures which experiment with the human form. Responding to the pain and devastation caused by the Second World War, his works proposed a new perspective on humanity and the collective psyche. Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti, this year-long series launched in May 2025 with an exhibition of works by Huma Bhabha, followed by Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026. Their artworks resonate with and respond to Giacometti’s sculptures, opening up new intergenerational dialogues through the timeless themes of death, fragmentation, the domestic, memory, trauma, the erotic, horror and humour. This is the first time that their sculptures will be seen alongside Giacometti’s works.

This publication features new essays by exhibition curators Shanay Jhaveri (Head of Visual Arts, Barbican) and Émilie Bouvard (Director of Collections and Scientific Programme, Fondation Giacometti) and is richly illustrated with images of the exhibitions. Artist conversations with Huma Bhabha, Mona Hatoum, and Lynda Benglis offer new insight into each artist's practice and their particular relationships to the work of Alberto Giacometti. This volume contains three-hole sewn paperbacks in a slipcase. 

Encounters: Giacometti

The first major biography on Anni Albers traces the complex personality and influential artistic career of the groundbreaking modern artist



Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. As a textile designer, weaver, writer, and graphic artist, she inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wall hangings, and took the processes of printmaking into uncharted territory. This intimate biography draws on personal conversations with Albers from the 1970s up until Albers’s death and on unprecedented archival research to tell a fresh and full story of Albers’s life and the development of her unique and influential artistic vision.

Capturing Albers’s extraordinary perspective about the world around her, whether the milieu she was observing was the wealthy bourgeois Berlin of her childhood or the Mexican villages where she came to feel remarkably at home, Nicholas Fox Weber brings the artist’s pithy wit and imaginative mind to life. Weber presents a riveting narrative that follows Albers’s trajectory from her time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College to her later years in Connecticut. He considers her complex relationship with her world-renowned husband, Josef Albers, as well as her encounters with luminaries such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Louise Nevelson. He also describes her torturous, late-life obsession with film star Maximilian Schell, thirty-one years her junior. Weber foregrounds Albers’s perpetual curiosity, originality, and humor, as well as her novelistic sense of the world around her.

Book cover of Anni Albers: A Life by Nicholas Fox Weber

Anni Albers: A Life

Sarah Roberts

Saul Nelson

John Ashbery

Pierre Schneider

Introduction by Sarah Roberts. Texts by Sarah Roberts, Saul Nelson, John Ashbery, and Pierre Schneider.

Dedicated to Joan Mitchell’s remarkable paintings from 1960 to 1965, this richly produced catalogue illuminates a pivotal chapter in the internationally acclaimed artist’s career.



After settling permanently in France in 1959, the American painter Joan Mitchell embarked on a period of radical experimentation that diverged dramatically from her earlier work, replacing structured compositional frameworks with more untamed, atmospheric forms. She began spending long stretches living on a sailboat along the Côte d’Azur, absorbing the effects of the shifting light, water, and rugged coastlines of the Mediterranean. Back in her Paris studio, these experiences gave rise to daring and moody canvases that engaged with landscape more directly and visibly than she ever had before.

Characterized by dense, central currents of deep greens and blues that veil luminous colors beneath, the paintings of this period pulse with turbulence and lyricism. The poet John Ashbery described them as “an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air,” capturing Mitchell’s ability to translate sensation and memory into paint. This catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition 

To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965

 at David Zwirner, New York, explores how these works advanced her approach to structure and color while engaging the enduring themes that define her oeuvre.

The volume features an introduction and an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Sarah Roberts, a text by Saul Nelson on the relationship of critic Clement Greenberg's criticism to Mitchell's work, and exhibition reviews from the 1960s by Ashbery and Pierre Schneider, offering rich historical context for this transformative moment in the artist’s career.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Anahid Nersessian

By R. Buckminster Fuller. Introduction by Anahid Nersessian.

by R. Buckminster Fuller is a profound and visionary exploration of how humanity can think, design, and act more intelligently in service of the whole planet.



In this concise yet powerful work, Buckminster Fuller—renowned inventor, futurist, and creator of the geodesic dome—contends that intuition is not the opposite of logic, but rather its highest expression. Drawing on decades of experience as a systems thinker, Fuller examines how intuitive insight allows humans to grasp complex, interconnected realities that linear thinking alone cannot fully explain.

Named for Fuller’s sailboat and written in 1968, 

 takes the form of a book-length poem—now brought back into print as part of David Zwirner Books’s beloved 

 series. The text is a uniquely metaphysical addition to Fuller’s oeuvre, presenting a new side to the prolific theorist. An introduction by literary scholar Anahid Nersessian explores the text from a poetics perspective, drawing out the effects of the verse.

This book is both a meditation and a call to action, inviting readers to trust deeper patterns of understanding while remaining rigorously engaged with evidence and reason; this deeply humanist vision is especially urgent in contemporary times. Essential reading for architects, designers, thinkers, and anyone interested in sustainability, systems theory, or visionary thought, Intuition offers timeless insight into how humans can do “more with less” and navigate an increasingly complex world.

As part of the 

 continues the exploration of how language and form can render complex, abstract ideas vividly in the mind, bridging thought and perception in the same spirit that the series brings visual and literary experience into dialogue.

Intuition: R. Buckminster Fuller, front cover

Intuition

A painting by Michael Armitage, titled Enasoit, dated 2019.

Portrait of Michael Armitage, 2021. Photo by Tom Jamieson

Marina Warner

Warsan Shire

Text by Marina Warner. Poetry by Warsan Shire

Highlighting powerful new paintings and sculptures by Michael Armitage, this catalogue showcases the artist’s poignant, timely, and profoundly humanistic works.



Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage’s work weaves real and imagined histories into powerful reflections on contemporary social and political life. 

 presents a selection of recent works exploring journeys across borders and the broader experience of displacement. Many of the artist’s paintings on Lubugo bark cloth—a traditional Ugandan textile used in funerary rituals, which he has employed for more than a decade—depict scenes from a migration route stretching from the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea toward Europe. These works, both intimate and epic, consider migration not only as movement across geography but as a condition that shapes identity, memory, and belonging.

The volume also features a series of bronze-relief sculptures inspired by the Stations of the Cross, reimagined to center migrants and the displaced—figures often marginalized within contemporary society—within a shared cultural and spiritual narrative. Armitage’s direct, emotionally charged imagery invites viewers to reflect on how migrants are seen, represented, and understood today.

Published to accompany the exhibition at David Zwirner New York, the catalogue includes an essay by Marina Warner on the role of myth in Armitage’s depictions of arduous journeys. Two poems by Warsan Shire, including a newly commissioned work, offer lyrical responses to the themes of the artist’s practice.

Michael Armitage: Crucible

Contributions by Frances Morris, Katharine Stout, and Jennifer Higgie 

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, from February 28 to April 19, 2026, this book brings together leading authorities on Rose Wylie's work and many of her distinct images.

Rose Wylie OBE RA lives and works in Kent. She paints from memory, frequently taking her imagery from mass media. Her large works on unstretched, unprimed canvas appear simple at first glance, but close inspection reveals them to be subtle meditations on the nature of visual representation. She regularly brings together apparently disparate images, creating visual rhymes and resonances that coalesce into unified compositions.

This new book, the catalogue of a large-scale exhibition at the Royal Academy, brings together leading authorities on Wylie’s work and a host of her unmistakable imagery.

Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First

t presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie. She has won global recognition with her unique artistic practice and wide range of themes. Wylie’s large-format paintings are a mixture of figurative representation, abstraction and stories in pictures. Expressive, direct and filled with subversive humour, they bear witness to the artist’s engagement with pop culture, literature, history, and personal experiences. Wylie’s artistic language is deliberately simple, and recalls the aesthetic of Bad Painting and Post-Pop.

With works from the last thirty years, the book provides an insight into the untamed oeuvre of an artist who overcomes conventional boundaries and occupies a unique place in the contemporary art scene. Individual works are also being painted specially for the exhibition in Bern, and shown to the public for the first time, just as Juergen Teller’s photographs, in their inimitable way, introduce us to the artists’ world in her different way.

Rose Wylie: Flick and Float

Yu Nishimura. Photo by Takashi Homma for MARFA

Contributions by Alexis Vaillant and Fabrice Hergott. Conversation between the artist and Jonas Wood

The eponymous monograph of Japanese artist Yu Nishimura is the first English-language publication to survey the artist’s works from 2016 to 2024, featuring his lucid figuration to scenic landscapes



The book includes Nishimura’s own photographs which inspired his paintings, two texts by the writers Alexis Vaillant and Fabrice Hergott and a conversation with the artist Jonas Wood.

Yu Nishimura

The first R. Crumb comic book in 23 years! 

The seminal cartoonist who single-handedly invented the alternative comics format of the one-person anthology in 1967 with 

 returns at age 81, still raging at the world and himself, still drawing like a master, and still funny... mostly. In his latest comics excursion, Crumb dives down internet and newspaper rabbit-holes, and comes up asking questions. Why don't we know the real background of deep state careerists? And is Crumb himself just as paranoid as everyone else tells him he is? Or is that just what THEY want you to think?

Mixing memoir, essay, polemic, neurosis, and conspiracy across 12 short comics—including the final "Dirty Laundry" story, drawn by Crumb with a script written with Aline Kominsky-Crumb before her death in 2022— 

 shows there's still plenty of life in both the artist and the classic underground comics format.

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Each card in this 54-card deck designed by Chris Ofili features a different woman, man or flower from the artist’s Afro Muse series, a body of work exhibited by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005.

Although reminiscent of someone, somewhere at some moment in time, these intimate watercolour images are figurative expressions rather than portraits of individuals. Like the characters that populate Ofili’s larger paintings, they derive from impressions and references from everyday life, memory and the history of art.

Chris Ofili: Afro Muses Playing Cards

Contributions by Charlotte Ickes, Josh T Franco, Julie Ault, Joshua Chambers-Letson, and Teresita Fernández

 examines Felix Gonzalez–Torres’s work in relation to portraiture and accompanies a major exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. As one of the leading artists of the twentieth century, Gonzalez-Torres broadened the horizon of portraiture from a genre associated with static representations of individuals to one with the capacity to change, remain resonant, and encourage collaboration. With no formal beginning or end point, the exhibition and monograph unfold at the intersection of Gonzalez-Torres’s groundbreaking work, the context of two Smithsonian collections, and the historically significant setting of Washington, DC.

 weaves together documentation of the exhibition with new scholarship by the exhibition’s curators, Josh T Franco and Charlotte Ickes; essays by Julie Ault and Joshua Chambers-Letson; and archival texts that shape the conceptual foundation for the exhibition. This in-depth look at the artist’s relationship to portraiture and historiography provides a new way into the practice of one the most significant artists of our time.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return

This six-panel cotton hat features a custom embroidered design by R. Crumb for the Los Angeles gallery location of David Zwirner. 

David Zwirner Los Angeles Hat

An installation view of the exhibition, Suzan Frecon: recent paintings, oil and water, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2022.

Marcella Durand

 pairs poems by Marcella Durand with reproductions of paintings on paper by Suzan Frecon. The book marks the first collaboration between Frecon and Durand, who are mother and daughter, and a continuing connection to France, as Durand is a dual citizen and translator. A selection of Frecon’s works on paper featured in the publication will be included as part of the 2025 exhibition 

 in the David Zwirner Gallery in Paris. These “brushwork” pieces include small-scale experiments by Frecon with brush strokes and haematite pigments. 

Suzan Frecon: The Light Factory

Sigmar Polke, Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982

 is the catalogue for the exhibition devoted to Sigmar Polke at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. Bice Curiger, curator of the exhibition and a specialist in Polke’s work, is editing the book. It gathers paintings, photographs, and films plus graphic art from 1960 to 2009 to illustrate the multifaceted quality of the artist’s output, which is informed by astute observations and powerful creative choices that reflect the artist’s sense of irony and love of experimentation. One focus of the selection of works is on the political dimension of Polke’s oeuvre; he was an exacting analyst of the world around him and commented critically on politics, art, and history.

The extensive essay section includes the main contribution by Bice Curiger, and texts by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, Nina Pohl, Kathy Halbreich, Friedrich W. Heubach, Maria Stavrinaki, Petra Lange-Berndt and Dietmar Rübel. Poems by Thomas Kling and statements by artists Anne Imhof, Alvaro Barrington, Michael Krebber, Helen Marten, Trajal Harrell, and Laura Owens provide further insight into Polke’s work.

English/German bilingual edition

Sigmar Polke: Beneath the Cobblestones, the Earth (English/German edition)

Sasha Gordon, 2024. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Text by Kathy Huang. Contributions by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Genny Lim, Delia Cai, Kevin Kwan, and Fariha Róisín

The first book to highlight Asian diasporic women and nonbinary artists engaged with figurative painting, sculpture, and drawing—featuring the work of Sasha Gordon.



Genny Lim’s poem “Wonder Woman” follows a narrator who observes the everyday lives of Asian women—across generations, countries, and socioeconomic backgrounds—wondering if their experiences reflect her own. The poem centers Asian women as its protagonists and asks what commonalities exist between them.

Often underrepresented in museum collections and important exhibitions, Asian diasporic women and nonbinary artists are now receiving recognition; this book expands on two landmark shows of figurative art curated by Kathy Huang, organized in response to increasing anti-Asian racism and violence during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The forty featured artists, each represented with four or more works and a personal statement, subvert stereotypes and assert their identities in places where they have historically been marginalized. While some featured artists explore identity through self-portraiture, others depict the heroines in their lives, offering works that highlight family, community, and history. Several of the works address colonial and patriarchal structures in the West, legends, and myths. With essays, paintings, sculptures, and drawings created within the last four years, this book is a current, open-ended collection of contemporary Asian diasporic experiences.

Wonder Women: Art of the Asian Diaspora

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.