David Zwirner Books: Fall 2022

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

The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.

 is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck. 

Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the Game

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

Portrait of Michael Armitage, 2021. Photo by Tom Jamieson

Texts by Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Sean O'Toole

 is the artist’s first exhibition in Australia, presenting recent work with a suite of new paintings that reflect on the recent Kenyan elections and the political rallies and dissidence that followed. Sumptuous and explicit in their representation of the human body, Armitage’s paintings reconsider cultural traditions and stereotypes, spinning the exoticising gaze of Western art history into a different direction. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, edited by curator Natasha Bullock, features essays by Sean O’Toole and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and poems by Mukoma Wa Ngugi.

Michael Armitage: The Promised Land

 is a new zine designed by R. Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Sophie Crumb on occasion of the 2022 exhibition at David Zwirner in Paris. The zine features details from individual and collaborative works featured in the show, which expand on the Crumb family’s collective interest in graphic and comic portrayals.

Out of stock

Sauve qui peut ! (Run for Your Life)

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Contributions by Kelly Baum, Randall Griffey, Meredith A. Brown, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Susanna V. Temkin



"For me, people come first," Alice Neel declared in 1950. "I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being." 



This ambitious publication surveys Neel's nearly 70-year career through the lens of her radical humanism. Remarkable portraits of victims of the Great Depression, fellow residents of Spanish Harlem, leaders of political organizations, queer artists, visibly pregnant women, and members of New York's global diaspora reveal that Neel viewed humanism as both a political and philosophical ideal. In addition to these paintings of famous and unknown sitters, the more than 100 works highlighted include Neel's emotionally charged cityscapes and still lifes as well as the artist’s erotic pastels and watercolors. Essays tackle Neel's portrayal of LGBTQ subjects; her unique aesthetic language, which merged abstraction and figuration; and her commitment to progressive politics, civil rights, feminism, and racial diversity. The authors also explore Neel's highly personal preoccupations with death, illness, and motherhood while reasserting her place in the broader cultural history of the 20th century.

Alice Neel: People Come First

Text by Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel. Contributions by Paul Auster, Gisele Barreau, Eric de Chassey, Jennifer Hickey, David Reed, Eileen Myles, Richard Shiff, Joyce Pensato and Jenni Quilter

A sweeping retrospective exploring the oeuvre of an incandescent artist, revealing the ways that Mitchell expanded painting beyond Abstract Expressionism as well as the transatlantic contexts that shaped her



Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) was fearless in her experimentation, creating works of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity. This gorgeous book unfolds the story of an artistic master of the highest order, revealing the ways she expanded abstract painting and illuminating the transatlantic contexts that shaped her. Lavish illustrations cover the full arc of her artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings of the early 1950s to the majestic multipanel compositions she made in France later in her career. Signature works are represented here along with rarely seen paintings, works on paper, artist’s sketchbooks, and photographs of Mitchell’s life, social circle, and surroundings.

Featuring scholarly texts, in-depth essays, and artistic and literary responses, this book is organized in ten chronological chapters. Each chapter centers on a closely related suite of paintings, illuminating a shifting inner landscape colored by experience, sensation, memory, and a deep sense of place. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life, and connections to poetry and music, this unprecedented volume is an essential reference for Mitchell’s admirers and those just discovering her work.

Joan Mitchell, Yale University Press, 2021

Joan Mitchell

Installation view of the exhibition titled Barbara Kruger at David Zwirner in New York, dated 2022.

Edited with text by Peter Eleey, Robyn Farrell, Michael Govan, Rebecca Morse, James Rondeau. Foreword by Michael Govan, Glenn D. Lowry, James Rondeau. Essay by Zoé Whitley.

Five decades of iconic and incisive art from Barbara Kruger

Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kruger (born 1945) has been interrogating the hierarchies of power and control in works that often combine visual and written language. In her singular graphic style, Kruger probes aspects of identity, desire and consumerism that are embedded in our everyday lives. This volume traces her continuously evolving practice to reveal how she adapts her work in accordance with the moment, site and context. The book features a range of striking images—from her analogue paste-ups of the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, including new works produced on the occasion of the exhibition. Also featured are singular works in vinyl, her large-scale room wraps, multichannel videos, site-specific installations and commissioned works.

The book also showcases how Kruger’s site-specific works have been reconceived for each venue, and includes a section of reprinted texts selected by the artist. Renowned for her use of direct address and her engagement with contemporary culture, Kruger is one of the most incisive and courageous artists working today. This volume explores how her pictures and words remain urgently resonant in a rapidly changing world.

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue in Danish and English. It features contributions from curator Anna Kjærsgaard Gregersen and Tamar Garb, Professor in the History of Art at University College London. 

Michael Armitage: Account of an Illiterate Man

Introduction by Duro Olowu. Interview with the artist by Craig Taylor

, artist Marcel Dzama presents a raft of new works inspired by travelling through Mexico and Morocco which touch on the wonder that travel and the strange immersion in cultures aside from one’s own can so often engender. Taking visual cues from the evocative textures and colours around him, Dzama successfully captures the spirit of place, while communicating something essentially human in the experience of those places. Coming at a time of isolation, of stasis for so many, this book engages the imagination in a broad, borderless project, allowing the viewer access to the thrill of discovery and the excitement of the new.

Marcel Dzama: Pink Moon

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

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

The latest painting series from the Belgian master of eerie figuration

Belgian artist Michaël Borremans is a master of contradiction. His paintings draw heavily from 18th-century portraiture techniques, but depict scenes that are stranger and more surreal than they first appear: in one painting, children dance in a circle, cloaked in black robes; in another, a woman attempts to cram her whole hand into her mouth. Avoiding any suggestion of a specific time or place, Borremans’s eerie images are situated just slightly beyond the realms of possibility. His dark sense of humor and technical virtuosity are synthesized into a uniquely unsettling and endlessly fascinating experience for viewers.

This volume provides an overview of all of Borremans’s work since 2013, presented in seven different series of paintings. The majority of works collected here have never before been published.

Series 2013–2020

Michaël Borremans: The Badger's Song

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

 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

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.

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 (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

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