A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Texts by Lucy Askew, Gene Baro, Lynne Cooke, Maurice de Sausmarez, Michael Harrison, John Leighton Sir, Jennifer Licht, and Bridget Riley

The first-ever book dedicated to the celebrated British artist’s working drawings, created under the aegis of the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Bridget Riley’s paintings are developed carefully over time, the result of methodically working through pictorial variables such as colour, tone, scale, and rhythm. Studies are central to this process, allowing Riley to concentrate on the analysis and synthesis that lie at the heart of her working practice. Riley says, ‘Because my work is based on enquiry, studies are my chief method of exploration and my way into paintings’ (2005).

This volume richly illustrates the thinking that goes into Riley’s work through a selection of over 150 drawings, colour analyses, notations, scale studies and cartoons, most of which were exhibited at the artist’s recent seminal retrospective exhibitions in Edinburgh and London from 2019 to 2020 organized by the National Galleries of Scotland. The selection spans most of Riley’s working life, tracing the origins and evolving nature of her remarkable body of work. Riley’s beginnings are also documented through selected childhood drawings, work made during and immediately following her studies at Goldsmiths’ College and the Royal College of Art, and her early explorations into abstraction.

The artist’s working method is brought into high relief in a newly commissioned conversation with Riley and Sir John Leighton, Director of the National Galleries of Scotland. The text explores the cardinal moments in the artist’s practice and the impulses that bring her work into existence. The volume also includes four previously published texts dedicated to Riley’s studies and practice written by the artist herself, art historians, curators and museum directors, which shed further light on the enduring role of drawing and the process of exploration central to her work.

Bridget Riley Working Drawings

Dawn Ades

Richard Tuttle

Text by Dawn Ades. Poetry by Richard Tuttle

The year before he died, in what was one of the most difficult yet prolific periods of his life, Paul Klee created his most surprising and innovative works.

In 1939, the year before his death from a long illness and against a backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil and the outbreak of World War II, Paul Klee worked with a vigor and inventiveness that rivaled even the most productive periods of his youth. This book illuminates the artist’s response to his personal difficulties and the era’s broader realities through imagery that is tirelessly inventive—by turns political, solemn, playful, humorous, and poetic.

The works featured testify to Klee’s restless drive to experiment with form and material. His use of adhesive, grease, oil, chalk, and watercolor, among other media, resulted in surfaces that are not only visually striking, but also highly tactile and original. Not unlike a diary, the drawings are often meditative reflections on the pains and pleasures of life—their titles, among them 

Renowned art historian Dawn Ades looks at this group of paintings and drawings in the context of their time and as indicative of a pivotal moment in art history. Moved by this late period of Klee’s oeuvre, American artist Richard Tuttle responds to specific works in the form of a dialogical poem. This stunning publication highlights the novelty and ingenuity of Klee’s late works, which deeply affected the generation of artists—including Anni Albers, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, and Zao Wou-Ki—that emerged after World War II and continues to captivate artists and viewers alike today.

Out of print

Paul Klee: 1939

Bob Nickas

Laura McLean-Ferris

Text by Laura McLean-Ferris. Interview with the artist by Bob Nickas

In his rich new body of work, the Belgian artist Harold Ancart turns an immersive landscape of trees, mountains, and seas into a meditation on painting itself.

Ancart often paints subjects that naturally invite contemplation, such as the horizon, clouds, flowers, flames, and icebergs. His newest body of work captures the experience of landscape seen in motion or from a distance: trees blurred while driving past, a far-off inky-black sea, an evocative Martian mountain range. Recalling René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart blurs form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction.

Reproduced here in magnificent foldouts, two multipanel canvases situate the viewer between a mountainscape and a seascape, both monumental in scale. Ancart segments the seascape with a stark horizon line, dividing sky and ocean. Like other comparable motifs within the artist’s oeuvre, the vividly colored cloudy sky functions in an anthropomorphic way, alluding to the endless possibilities and personalities of organic forms.

Including an interview with the artist by Bob Nickas, this catalogue offers insight into Ancart’s frank reflections on painting, writing, nature, and more. The publication also features a new essay by Laura McLean-Ferris. Taken together, the works in 

 meditate on the expansive possibilities of painting.

Harold Ancart: Traveling Light

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Phoebe Hoban

By Phoebe Hoban. With a new introduction by the author

Phoebe Hoban’s definitive biography of the renowned American painter Alice Neel tells the unforgettable story of an artist whose life spanned the twentieth century, from women’s suffrage through the Depression, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and second-wave feminism. Throughout her life and work, Neel constantly challenged convention, ultimately gaining an enduring place in the canon.

Alice Neel’s stated goal was to “capture the zeitgeist.” Born into a proper Victorian family at the turn of the twentieth century, Neel reached voting age during suffrage. A quintessential bohemian, she was one of the first artists participating in the Easel Project of the Works Progress Administration, documenting the challenges of life during the Depression. An avowed humanist, Neel chose to paint the world around her, sticking to figurative work even during the peak of abstract expressionism. Neel never ceased pushing the envelope, creating a unique chronicle of her time.

Neel was fiercely democratic in selecting her subjects, who represent an extraordinarily diverse population—from such legendary figures as Joe Gould to her Spanish Harlem neighbors in the 1940s, the art critic Meyer Schapiro, Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, Andy Warhol, and major figures of the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements—producing an indelible portrait of twentieth-century America. By dictating her own terms, Neel was able to transcend such personal tragedy as the death of her infant daughter, Santillana, a nervous breakdown and suicide attempts, and the separation from her second child, Isabetta. After spending much of her career in relative obscurity, Neel finally received a major museum retrospective in 1974, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.

In this first paperback edition of the authoritative biography of Neel, which serves also as a cultural history of twentieth-century New York, Hoban documents the tumultuous life of the artist in vivid detail, creating a portrait as incisive as Neel’s relentlessly honest paintings. With a new introduction by Hoban that explores Neel’s enduring relevance, this biography is essential to understanding and appreciating the life and work of one of America’s foremost artists.

Book cover for Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty from David Zwirner Books.

Spread of Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, David Zwirner Books, 2021

Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty

Leslie Jamison

Seeing Shakespeare

Text by William Shakespeare. Artwork by Marcel Dzama. Introduction by Leslie Jamison

Set in an enchanted forest, Shakespeare’s 

is the ideal subject for artist Marcel Dzama, whose work frequently references dreams, fairy tales, and mythical worlds.

, Shakespeare’s celebrated romantic comedy intertwines multiple narratives under the influence of transformation and witchcraft. The play is often staged with actors wearing animal masks, an aspect that appeals particularly to Dzama, whose work is characterized by the fusion of human and animal, fantasy and reality.

As the second title in David Zwirner Books’s 

series, this book revisits this ultimate fairy tale through the eyes of a contemporary artist who feels a special affinity for its imagery.

William Shakespeare × Marcel Dzama: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Robert Storr

R. Crumb’s obsessions—from sex to the Bible, music, politics, and the vicissitudes and obscenities of daily life—are chronicled in this comprehensive book of work by the illustrious American comic artist.

Instrumental in the formation of the underground comics scene in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s, Crumb has ruptured and expanded the boundaries of the graphic arts, redefining comics and cartoons as countercultural art forms. Presenting a slice of Crumb’s unique universe, this book features a wide array of printed matter culled from the artist’s five-decade career—tear sheets of drawings and comics taken directly from the publications where the works first appeared, magazine and album covers, broadsides from the 1960s and 1970s, tabloids from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, Oakland, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and other counterculture enclaves, as well as exhibition ephemera. Complementing this volume are historical works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have inspired Crumb and pages from his rarely seen sketchbooks from the 1970s and 1980s that reveal his exemplary skill as a draftsman.

Documenting the critically acclaimed exhibition 

Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb 

at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, curated by Robert Storr, this publication offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in Crumb’s singular mind. In the accompanying text, Storr explores the challenging nature of some of Crumb’s work and the importance of artists who take on the status quo.

Crumb’s World

 is the first English translation of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 stage play

, part of a trilogy of radio plays from 1971 titled Trilogie Münchener Lebens. In his introduction to this book, Christopher Williams writes that “Inklusive consists of seven scenes of tightly scripted, sparsely rendered dialogue in regional Bavarian dialect...following the activities and conversations of a working-class West German couple on a prepaid all-inclusive vacation package in Italy. We are presented with a standardized list of tourist activities (sunbathing, morning walks on the beach, boat rides, picture-taking, and outdoor concerts) that are included in the program into which the couple has been inscribed.” Williams Studio along with Maximilian Klemens Sänger produced this translation as part of his ongoing research into Kroetz’s theatrical work for theatre, radio, and television.

Christopher Williams, Inklusive Franz Xaver Kroetz, 1971

Christopher Williams: Inklusive Franz Xaver Kroetz 1971

Nicholas Fox Weber

Anni & Josef Albers: Equal and Unequal, Phaidon, 2020

A spectacular and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and design

Josef - painter, designer, and teacher - and Anni Albers - textile artist and printmaker - are among the twentieth century's most important abstract artists, and this is the first monograph to celebrate the rich creative output and beguiling relationship of these two masters in one elegant volume. It presents their life and work as never before, from their formative years at the Bauhaus in Germany to their remarkable influence at Black Mountain College in the United States through their intensely productive period in Connecticut.

Accessibly written, the book is packed with more than 750 artworks, archival images, and documents - many published here for the first time - all tracing the remarkable lives and careers of this legendary couple.

Dispersed throughout area series of short essays on artists that focuses on the Alberses relationship with a number of important artists and architects of the 20th century, like Ruth Asawa, Marcel Breuer, Merce Cunningham, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Jacob Lawrence, and many more.

The beautifully cloth-bound package utilizes an elegant color palette and design that speaks to the work of both artists. This comprehensive visual biography showcases the artists' rich and dynamic lives, and their infinite influence on each other, as they shared the profound conviction that art was central to human existence.

Anni & Josef Albers: Equal and Unequal

"The godfather of colour photography has released a new photo book, shedding light on a little-known facet of his output—his sumptuously sun-drenched Polaroids.” –Daisy Woodward, AnOther

This book is a facsimile of an album of Eggleston's Polaroids assembled by the photographer himself, and containing the only photos he made in this medium. Consisting of 56 images taken with the Polaroid SX-70 (the now cult camera produced between 1972 and 1981) and hand-mounted in a black leather album also produced by the company, 

 is the first publication of Eggleston's Polaroids.

The gloriously mundane subjects of these photos—a Mississippi street sign, a telephone book, stacked crates of empty soda bottles—is familiar Eggleston territory, but, fascinatingly, all of these Polaroids were taken outdoors. They are rare records of Eggleston's strolls or drives in and around Mississippi, complementing the majority of his work made with color negative film or color slides, and showing his flair for photo-sequencing in book form.

William Eggleston: Polaroid SX-70

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

Portrait of Michael Armitage, 2021. Photo by Tom Jamieson

Edited by Anna Schneider, with contributions by Elsbeth Court, Imraan Coovadia, Anna Schneider and Dimona Stöckle; and a conversation between Michael Armitage and Don Handa

 highlights pivotal series by the painter Michael Armitage and positions his body of work within East African painting and sculpture of the 20th century. His wide array of subject matter ranges from the relationship between humans and animals, and political events in his native Kenya, to European landscape traditions in opposition to an East African understanding of nature. With large-format oil paintings on 

bark cloth, the British-Kenyan painter joins motifs and artistic traditions from Europe and East Africa in a variety of ways, upsetting visual stereotypes and an excepted balance of power in the process.

Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict

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

Éric de Chassey

Su Wei

Spotlight Series

Texts by Su Wei, Luc Tuymans, and Éric de Chassey

Widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans continues to expand our understanding of the medium. Sourcing imagery from books, magazines, films, the internet, and increasingly his own iPhone photos, Tuymans’s unique selection of subject matter reveals his fascination with moral complexities.

Exploring diverse and sensitive topics, many of which include historic references from World War II to more contemporary events such as 9/11, Tuymans presents imagery that at first seems innocuous or approachable but upon deeper inspection can be entirely unsettling. Achieved through his masterful handling of paint, his works are often suggestive of memories or familiar people, places, and things.

, which focuses on new bodies of work by contemporary artists, Tuymans continues to take on increasingly complex subject matters in his primarily muted palette. Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong, this book features an essay by art critic Su Wei, who approaches Tuymans’s newest paintings and how they expand his oeuvre.

Out of stock

Luc Tuymans: Good Luck

Isabelle Dervaux

Lawrence Rinder

Lindsey Tyne

Colin B. Bailey

Text by Isabelle Dervaux. Contributions by Lawrence Rinder and Lindsey Tyne. Foreword by Colin B. Bailey

Featuring more than ninety drawings and many sketchbook pages that span Al Taylor’s entire career, this book documents the artist’s important achievements as a draftsman.

This book investigates important and illuminating aspects of Al Taylor’s drawings, which numbered over five thousand at the time of his death. It includes a chronological survey of Taylor’s drawings from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, highlighting the combination of technical refinement, humor, and sensuousness that characterizes his works on paper. Stunning reproductions of the works, which were inspired by such ordinary things as tin cans, pet stains, and broomsticks, reveal the drawings’ minute details, nuanced shading, and playfully agile pencil lines. Lively texts explore how the rich and complex visual sensibilities of Taylor’s drawings resonate with that of late Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters. The book also examines Taylor’s innovative approach to process and materials, such as photocopier toner, with its intense black, and the extreme white of correction fluid. Created with equal parts humor and technical virtuosity, and informed by scientific models as well as everyday minutiae, Al Taylor’s magnificent drawings are meditations on form and structure that stand as testament to great draftsmanship.

The Drawings of Al Taylor

Ann Temkin

Erica Cooke

Tamar Margalit

Chirstine Mehring

James Meyer

Annie Ochmanek

Yasmil Raymond

Jeffrey Weiss

Edited with text by Ann Temkin. Text by Erica Cooke, Tamar Margalit, Christine Mehring, James Meyer, Annie Ochmanek, Yasmil Raymond, and Jeffrey Weiss

Published to accompany the first US retrospective exhibition of Donald Judd’s sculpture in more than thirty years, 

 explores the work of a landmark artist who, over the course of his career, developed a material and formal vocabulary that transformed the field of modern sculpture.

Donald Judd was among a generation of artists in the 1960s who sought to entirely do away with illusion, narrative, and metaphorical content. 

 surveys the evolution of his work, beginning with his paintings, reliefs, and handmade objects from the early 1960s; through the years in which he built an iconic vocabulary of works in three dimensions, including hollow boxes, stacks, and progressions made with metals and plastics by commercial fabricators; and continuing through his extensive engagement with color during the last decade of his life. This richly illustrated catalogue takes a close look at Judd’s achievements, and using newly available archival materials at the Judd Foundation and elsewhere, expands scholarly perspectives on his work. Essays by curators and scholars address subjects such as his early beginnings in painting, the fabrication of his sculptures, his site-specific pieces, and his work in design and architecture.

Judd

Text by Donald Judd. Edited by Flavin Judd, Rainer Judd, and Judd Foundation

This book presents an unprecedented visual survey of the living and working spaces of the artist Donald Judd in New York and Texas.

Filled with newly commissioned and previously unpublished archival photographs alongside five essays by the artist, this book provides an opportunity to explore Judd’s personal spaces, which are a crucial part of this revered artist’s oeuvre. From a 19th-century cast-iron building in Manhattan to an extensive ranch in the mountains of western Texas, this book details the interiors, exteriors, and lands surrounding the buildings that comprise Judd’s extant living and working spaces. Readers will discover how Judd developed the concept of permanent installation at Spring Street in New York City, with artworks, furniture, and decorative objects striking a balance between the building’s historic qualities and his own architectural innovations. His buildings in Marfa, Texas, demonstrate how Judd reiterated his concept of integrative living on a larger scale, extending to the reaches of the Chinati Mountains at Ayala de Chinati, his 33,000-acre ranch south of the town. Each of the spaces was thoroughly considered by Judd with resolute attention to function and design. From furniture to utilitarian structures that Judd designed himself, these residences reflect Judd’s consistent aesthetic. His spaces underscore his deep interest in the preservation of buildings and his deliberate interventions within existing architecture.

Donald Judd Spaces

This artist's book was made on the occasion of the exhibition 

Christopher Williams: Footwear (Adapted for Use)

Christopher Williams: Model 38

Michael Glover

Celebrated British painter Rose Wylie—whose works are at once tactile, cerebral, and humorous—often draws her influence from a wide range of popular culture. Here her newest body of work references memories from her own life and mimics the way memories evolve and change over time.

Wylie’s source material is culled from the vast visual world around her, ranging from sixteenth-century British estates to Serena Williams and the French Open. While initially these may seem random or aesthetically simplistic, through the nuanced use of humor, language, and compositional structure, Wylie creates wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, and visual representation itself, in line with the paintings she has become known for over the course of her career.

A new essay by art critic Michael Glover explores the remarkable painter whose work has “spark, assurance, brash humor, an extraordinary, freewheeling eclecticism that seems to be just as ready to suck in references to the art of Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman portraiture as to pay homage to the films of Quentin Tarantino and the late paintings of Philip Guston.” Part of David Zwirner Books’s 

, this book features Wylie’s newest paintings and drawings and is published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition of these works at David Zwirner Hong Kong.

Rose Wylie: Painting a noun (English)

A new essay by art critic Michael Glover explores the remarkable painter whose work has “spark, assurance, brash humor, an extraordinary, freewheeling eclecticism that seems to be just as ready to suck in references to the art of Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman portraiture as to pay homage to the films of Quentin Tarantino and the late paintings of Philip Guston.” Part of David Zwirner Books’s 

Rose Wylie: Painting a noun (Bilingual)

Walter Price, 2024. Photo by Walter Price

Walter Price: The Story Was Full of Marvelous Happenings, Karma, 2019

A handsome suite of expressionistic, semi-abstract works on paper

The latest book from New York–based painter Walter Price (born 1989) brings together 34 recent works on paper that employ the same iconic imagery, intimate scale and dreamlike compositions of both abstraction and figuration that are found in his paintings.

Walter Price: The Story Was Full of Marvelous Happenings

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

Edited by Eva Respini. Contributions by Carter E. Foster, Ed Halter, Jessica Hong, Shanay Jhaveri, Huma Bhabha and Sterling Ruby

A comprehensive overview of more than two decades of Huma Bhabha’s prolific and multidisciplinary output in sculpture, drawing, and photography.

Huma Bhabha (b. 1962 in Karachi) is known for sculptures depicting the human figure fashioned from materials ranging from clay, brick, and wood to Styrofoam, bronze, found objects, and construction materials. Such works reveal her myriad influences, including horror films, science fiction, ancient artifacts, religious reliquaries, and Neo-Expressionism. This handsome volume surveys over two decades of Bhabha’s innovative sculptures, as well as her lesser-known but essential work in drawing, photography, and printmaking, all while considering her singular engagement with the human figure. Illustrated essays investigate the artist’s prolific and multidisciplinary output, her historical and cultural reference points, and her frequent themes, such as war, colonialism, displacement, and the memory of home—in the artist’s words, these are “eternal concerns” found across all cultures. A conversation between Bhabha and American artist Sterling Ruby offers an intimate point of entry into Bhabha’s perspectives and artistic practice.

Huma Bhabha: They Live

Caldecot Chubb

 is a facsimile of the third of William Eggleston’s rare artist’s books, which was first published in an edition of only fifteen by Caldecot Chubb in New York in 1978. The original 

 was a linen-bound volume with red leather spine and corners recreating the look of a photo album, and housed in a slipcase. Within its pages were twelve original chromogenic coupler prints focused on the theme of flowers.

Flowers, along with trees and other foliage inevitably feature in many of Eggleston’s photos as part of the Memphis streetscapes and interiors that are his favorite motifs. But in this book the flowers take center stage in all their mundane glory—be it a kitsch spray of gladioli and carnations in a cut-glass vase, a single rose before a box hedge, or a forlorn bunch on a white marble tomb inscribed with the word “Mama.” Along with Eggleston’s 

 is a further chapter in Steidl’s publication of Eggleston’s artist’s books in new editions that honor the design and spirit of the originals, while exposing their contents to the wider public for the first time.

12 color photographs printed on Phoenixmotion Xantur 115gsm paper from Scheufelen paper mill, mounted on Somerset Book 115gsm paper from St. Cuthbert Mill with PVA adhesive. The type, has been set in Monotype Dante, in reference to Katy Homans’ original design for William Eggleston´s 1978 book.

William Eggleston: Flowers

ekphrasis

A laugh-out-loud visual history of the strangest piece of men’s clothing ever created: the codpiece.

The codpiece was fashioned in the Middle Ages to close a revealing gap between two separate pieces of men’s tights. By the sixteenth century, it had become an upscale must-have accessory. This light-hearted, illustrated examination of its history pulls in writers from Rabelais to Shakespeare and figures from Henry VIII to Alice Cooper. Glover’s witty and entertaining prose reveals how male vanity turned a piece of cloth into a bulging and absurd representation of masculinity itself. The codpiece, painted again and again by masters such as Titian, Holbein, Giorgione, and Bruegel, became a symbol of royalty, debauchery, virility, and religious seriousness—all in one.

Centuries of male self-importance and delusion are on display in this highly enjoyably new title. Glover’s book moves from paintings to contemporary culture and back again as it charts the growing popularity of the codpiece and its eventual decline. The first history of its kind, this book is a must-read for art historians, anthropologists, fashion aficionados, and readers looking for a good, long laugh.

Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Edited with text by Martin Germann, and Bernhard Schwenk. Texts by Steven Jacobs, Luk Lambrecht, and Philippe Van Cauteren

From his debut in 1964, the widely beloved Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser pursued and developed a unique compositional sensibility in which distinctions between abstraction and figuration were to dissolve in an intimate, humble sensation of “everydayness.” His modestly scaled paintings featured simple but elusive shapes often rendered in a broadly pastel palette, full of gentle sensuality.

This 240-page volume accompanies the first posthumous retrospective exhibition on De Keyser at S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018, and is conceived as the new standard De Keyser monograph. Alongside a detailed account of the development of his art, it contains a comprehensive illustrated chronology, as well as a revelatory chapter on his drawing and photography. Friends and admirers of De Keyser’s, such as Tomma Abts, Maria Eichhorn, Werner Feiersinger, Suzan Frecon, Roland Jooris, Thomas Scheibitz, and James Welling, contribute comments on his life and work.

Raoul De Keyser: Oeuvre

14.08.041_mama-mummy-and-mamma-predecessors-2_splash_1

Portrait of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo by Stefan Ruiz

Edited by Ian Berry and Steven Matijcio. Interview by Ian Berry. Essays by Malik Gaines and Steven Matijcio

 unites works from the artist’s Predecessors series. Investigating the confluences, contact zones, and third spaces of culture, Akunyili Crosby represents the people and places closest to her: the women of her family, her partner, the interiors of her grandmother’s home and her own. Even in the midst of such personal themes, Akunyili Crosby opens these painted worlds to her viewers, and invites them to reflect upon their own experiences, memories, and emotions.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Predecessors

A painting by Nate Lowman, titled Maria, dated 2022.

Taking humanity and popular culture as his subject matter, Nate Lowman approaches these themes as an active participant in the collective American experience. Underscoring this is desire: a longing for something or someone, or a wish for something to happen. The duality inherent in desire is contained in Lowman’s use of well-known images whose meanings are both instantly recognizable and constantly in flux. Appropriated, relatable images and language from American pop culture and its 24-hour news cycle form a narrative and tell part of the American story. Angels, poppies, hearts, pine-tree air fresheners, smiley faces, iconic celebrities, crosses and news articles—all presented through the lens of desire—confront viewers with the things of modern life that are often left unsaid and unexamined.

For more than a decade, Nate Lowman has produced paintings, sculptures, and (often salon-style) installations that process and represent the unfolding human experience in a visual environment of endlessly proliferating public media archives. Re-presenting and reframing techniques of image reproduction as painterly practice, Lowman constructs narratives condensed in layers of studio techniques, including printing, cropping, projecting, cutting, staining, repurposing, lacquering, stripping, and stretching. His paintings explore the capacity of images to mediate between the personal and the universal in cycles of decay and renewal.

Published on the occasion of the Aspen Art Museum’s exhibition of the New York–based artist, Nate Lowman is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist to date.

Nate Lowman: Before and After

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