Claudia Jolles

Ellie Meyer

Texts by Claudia Jolles, Flavin Judd, and Ellie Meyer

The work of Donald Judd, one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, has come to define Minimalist art, a label to which the artist strongly objected. The unaffected, straightforward quality of Judd’s work demonstrates his strong interest in color, form, material, and space. Wanting to create works that could assume a direct material and physical presence without recourse to grand philosophical statements, Judd eschewed classical ideals of representational sculpture and created works that relied on clear, definite objects.

 represents the first-ever focused examination of Judd’s works in Cor-ten steel, which he began to produce in earnest in 1989 and would continue to elaborate on until his death in 1994. Cor-ten is an alloy that makes steel more resistant to corrosion, and eliminates the need for paint. With its distinctive red-brown patina, Cor-ten afforded Judd a new medium for exploring the relationship between surface and volume, as well as color and form. Prior to 1989, Judd executed a handful of works in Cor-ten primarily as outdoor commissions or site-specific works. This volume is produced on the occasion of the 2015 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York. Designed in close collaboration with Flavin Judd and Judd Foundation, 

 sheds new light on a body of work that represents the culmination of three decades of aesthetic output and underscores the mastery and control over material and space that characterizes Judd’s practice as a whole.

Donald Judd: Cor-ten

Robin Clark

A key member of the Light and Space movement in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s, De Wain Valentine is distinguished in particular by his in-depth understanding of synthetic materials and his ability to transform industrial products into artworks that investigate the seductive power of light, transparency, reflection, and surface. Published in conjunction with his critically lauded 2015 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, 

De Wain Valentine: Works from the 1960s and 1970s

 focuses on the artist’s pioneering achievements in polyester resin. A new scholarly text by Robin Clark on Valentine’s production from this period details his personal history and his innovations with this material. Influenced by the vast California landscape, he was initially confronted with material limitations: at the time, polyester resins could not be poured in volumes exceeding fifty pounds. Not willing to accept this restriction, Valentine partnered with Hastings Plastics in 1966 to create an entirely new resin that could be cast in larger quantities. The resulting material, known as Valentine MasKast Resin, allowed the artist to dramatically increase the scale of his work. With its inherent ability to contain and reflect light, while maintaining a powerful luminous dimension, polyester resin would form the foundation of Valentine’s practice.

 includes rich color plates of Valentine’s “Columns,” corporeally scaled sculptures cast in colored polyester resins that recede from a wider base up to a narrow tip; his “Circles,” 6-foot discs that display not only the artist’s mastery of geometrical form, but also highlight his command of color in sculpture; and a selection of the artist’s smaller forms—rings, discs, and double pyramids. The catalogue also features extensive documentation of 

 (1975–1976), two massive, identical columns that each stand twelve feet tall. Originally executed for Baxter Travenol Laboratories’ newly built corporate headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois, Valentine had conceived of two immense vertical columns standing side by side, but because of architectural modifications (the ceiling in the company’s reception area was lowered at a late stage of construction), Valentine was forced to install the two slabs on their sides. Forty years after its initial conception, the exhibition at David Zwirner represented the first time this work was presented in its intended configuration.

Dan Flavin, New York, 1970.  Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. © Maya Gorgoni

Michael Auping

Alexandra Whitney

Texts by Michael Auping and Alexandra Whitney

Showcasing Dan Flavin’s “corner,” “barrier,” and “corridor” works, this catalogue explores the artist’s core sculptural vocabulary and how his use of fluorescent light forged a new relationship between the art object and its surrounding architecture.

This publication examines how Flavin’s light works, which he described as “situations,” function in space, occupying key positions that highlight how the rooms themselves are constructed. The exhibition is not only historically significant, as it mines early explorations in Flavin’s practice, but many of the works are reproduced for the first time in plates that accurately capture their colors. Published on the occasion of the 2015 eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, 

takes as its point of departure the artist’s influential show, 

corners, barriers and corridors in fluorescent light from Dan Flavin

, presented at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1973.

Above all, the photography reveals the unexpected and powerful interplay between the light of neighboring pieces and the space—the way the walls, floor, and various hues mingle to form unpredicted palettes that reveal what Michael Auping, following Donald Judd, calls the “exoskeleton.” These works, with their immediate relationship to architecture, not only function as color experiments but as structural explorations in light, and in his essay, Auping explores how Flavin’s investigations of corners, barriers, and corridors became an essential part of the way the artist understood space. This publication also features rarely seen photographs of Flavin installing his historic 1973 exhibition, as well as detailed notes by Alexandra Whitney about the works included in the St. Louis presentation. Designed by McCall Associates, in close collaboration with the Estate of Dan Flavin, this catalogue presents an especially significant body of work in a completely new way and offers a vital historical perspective on Flavin’s practice.

Dan Flavin: Corners, Barriers and Corridors

Paul Morris

This special edition with an artist-signed bookplate is available in a limited run of 400 copies.

One of America’s most celebrated cartoonists, Robert Crumb helped define cartoon and punk subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s with comic strips like 

. The open sexuality of his work, paired with frequent self-deprecation and a free, almost stream-of-consciousness style, have made Crumb into a global voice and a renowned contemporary artist.

Originally published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1996, 

 is at once a satirical take on aesthetics and a continued exploration of Crumb’s subversion of sexuality and mainstream values. Drawings of women in positions ranging from lascivious to modest or mid-sport are accompanied by quotations, many of which are from artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Harvey Kurtzman. Mining his own obsessions and fantasies, Crumb reimagines the history of art, challenging notions of beauty, along with society’s mores and expectations of propriety around the female form. The second volume of 

, published in 2003, expanded on the first, adding all new drawings (also of women) and quotations, likewise taken from the history of art and aesthetics. The effect of both volumes is undeniably destabilizing. The images appeal to a purely erotic sensibility, which in turn is undercut by the inclusion of highfalutin and frequently philosophical prose. The images drag philosophy back down to earth, while the writing challenges the pure eroticism of Crumb’s drawings.

 is released for the first time as part of 

Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb. 

It is published on the occasion of Crumb's exhibition at David Zwirner, London, which debuts the new work he created for the magazine’s third issue. Presenting all three volumes in one book, 

 is arranged chronologically and guides the reader through the twenty-year history of Crumb’s magazine, from the earliest images in the 1990s to the most recent drawings completed in 2016. Paul Morris, longtime gallerist and supporter of Crumb’s practice, writes an introduction that contextualizes this body of work and the artist’s career as a whole. This beautiful edition, with a cover specially designed by Crumb for its release, makes the initial two issues available for the first time in over ten years, and presents the new and previously unpublished material from the third. For seasoned supporters and novices alike, 

Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb

 is a wonderful window into Crumb’s world of bodies and ideas, art and beauty.

Out of stock

Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb (Limited Edition)

Text by Anette Gehrig. Contributions by Michael Freund, Sébastien Gokalp, Paul Morris, and Joost Swarte

The USA’s Aline Kominsky-Crumb (b. 1948) and Robert Crumb (b. 1943) are an odd couple—in life, as well as in art. He is a celebrated underground artist and she is a pioneer of the autobiographical comic. Since 1972, they have been collaboratively writing and drawing the autobiographical relationship-and-family comic strip 

, in which the societal upheavals of the 1970s, the differences between man and woman, and a handful of substantial neuroses play leading roles: a side-splitting drama, unique in the world of comics, with a wealth of punch lines. The publication 

Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb. Drawn Together

 coincides with the exhibition of the same name and contains selected episodes from 

, including the stories that have never been published in Europe before, supplemented with solo works by Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Robert Crumb, as well as photographs and articles on the life and works of these artists.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn Together

Text by Bob Nickas, Katy Siegel, Heidi Zuckerman

German artist Tomma Abts (born 1967) creates her paintings and drawings using a rigorous process that combines the rational with the intuitive. Starting with no external source material and no preconceived idea of the final result, Abts makes complex abstract compositions that ultimately take as their subject the process of their own creation. This publication accompanies her exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, which is the first to survey the artist's extensive drawing practice. It features 41 works from 1996 to the present—many never before exhibited—and includes new works created specifically for the exhibition. The catalogue also features essays by Bob Nickas, Katy Siegel and Heidi Zuckerman.

Tomma Abts: Mainly Drawings

Limning a dizzying array of topics with his distinctive combinations of image and text, Raymond Pettibon has created a vocabulary of characters and symbols that reappear consistently if enigmatically across his oeuvre, ranging from baseball players, atomic bombs, and railway trains to the cartoon Gumby. But the most poetic and revealing of Pettibon’s symbols may be the surfer, the solitary longboarder challenging a massive wave. In his surfer works, viewers ride along with a counterculture existentialist hero who perhaps is the artist’s nearest proxy.

This revised and expanded edition of 

, the first printing of which sold out almost immediately upon publication in 2014, features twenty additional works, as well as new color separations and jacket design. Nearly all the works included in this volume depict an ocean roiling with chaotic swells, accompanied by non sequiturs, quotations, and fragments of poetry in the artist’s handwriting. Organized chronologically, the publication traces Pettibon’s prolific output of his surfer series, from early small-scale monochrome India ink drawings to numerous examples from the 1990s when the artist introduced color, culminating with his recent large-scale works, some of which were executed directly on a wall. Rounding out the publication is a poetic meditation by the writer Carlo McCormick, which captures the essence of Pettibon’s surfing works: “Riddled with enigma, Raymond Pettibon’s art speaks little about himself the artist, preferring rather to address more central questions on the nature of self, but he tells us this, ‘Some things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn at all, but only surfed,’ or again, ‘All this must be either surfed or painted.’"

Cover of a book titled Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015, published by David Zwirner Books in 2015

Interior spread from a book titled Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015, published by David Zwirner Books in 2015

Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015

Kai Hong

Kate YK Lim

Park Kyung-mee

Richard Vine

Introduction by Park Kyung-mee. Texts by Kai Hong, Kate Lim, and Richard Vine

This monograph serves as a comprehensive survey of Yun Hyong-keun's oeuvre covering forty years from his earliest surviving efforts through his very last works. This overview is accompanied by insightful critical essays by Kai Hong, Kate Lim, and richard Vine that offer diverse contemporary perspectives on the style, themes, and historical context of this remarkable artist.

Korea's Dansaekhwa movement which formed one of the most complex efforts at artistic expression in the 1970s has at long last started to attract international interest and a serious appraisal by experts outside of Asian art. Yun was a central figure in the Dansaekhwa movement who also firmly established his own artistic integrity by drawing on traditional Korean art and themes as the root for his conceptual approach and aesthetic sensibility.

Selected Works 1972–2007

Yun Hyong-keun

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Midori Yamamura

Yayoi Kusama is the most famous artist to emerge from Japan in the period following World War II. Part of a burgeoning international art scene in the early 1960s, she exhibited in New York with Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, and other Pop and Minimalist luminaries, and in Europe with the Dutch Nul and the German Zero artist groups. Known for repetitive patterns, sewn soft sculptures, naked performance, and suggestive content, Kusama’s work anticipated the politically charged feminist art of the 1970s. But Kusama and her work were soon eclipsed by a dealer-controlled art market monopoly of white male American artists. Returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama became almost as famous for her self-proclaimed mental illness and permanent residence in a psychiatric hospital as she was for her art. In this book, Midori Yamamura eschews the usual critical fascination with Kusama’s biography to consider the artist in her social and cultural milieu. By examining Kusama’s art alongside that of her peers, Yamamura offers a new perspective on Kusama’s career.

Yamamura shows that Kusama, who came of age in totalitarian wartime Japan, embraced art as an anti-conformist pursuit, seeking a subjective autonomy that resulted in the singular expression of her art. Examining Kusama’s association with European and New York art movements of the 1960s and her creation of psychedelic light-and-sound “Happenings,” Yamamura argues that Kusama and her heterogeneous peers defied and undermined various pillars of modernity during the crucial transition from the modern nation-state to global free-market capitalism.

The art market rediscovered Kusama in the 1990s, and she has since had a series of high-profile exhibitions. Recounting Kusama’s story, Yamamura offers an incisive, penetrating analysis of postwar art’s globalization as viewed from the periphery.

Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular

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

Dominic Eichler

Wolfgang Tillmans

Texts by Dominic Eichler and Wolfgang Tillmans

From the start, Wolfgang Tillmans's (born 1968) abstract photographs played a decisive role in his gentle subversion of photographic hierarchies and his seductive emphasis on the materiality of photographic objects in his presentation of them. In the past decade he has pursued this tack, making wholly non-representational photographs that explore processes of exposure. From the delicate veils of color in the 

 series, and the sculptural paper drops made of folded or rolled-up photographic paper, to the colorfully compelling works of the 

 series, the printed object itself, divorced from its reproductive function, is always the point. "For me, the abstract picture is already objective because it's a concrete object and represents itself," Tillmans says; "the paper on which the picture is printed is for me an object, there is no separating the picture from that which carries it. That's why I like to show photographs sometimes framed and sometimes not, just taped to the wall." Designed by the photographer, and with 275 color reproductions of these works, 

--now in paperback--impressively demonstrates how fruitfully Tillmans has mined this terrain.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Abstract Pictures

Philipp Kaiser

This generously illustrated book examines a series of color photographs by Los Angeles–based artist James Welling, who turned to the painter Andrew Wyeth for inspiration.

As a conceptual artist who is deeply interested in the genesis of representation, Welling began this series of photographs as an examination of Andrew Wyeth’s influence on his own work, from Welling’s earliest watercolors in the 1960s through his recent photographs. Shot on location in Pennsylvania and Maine—in the same areas where Wyeth painted throughout his life—this major series includes photographs from 2010 through 2014. In addition to including never-before-seen works from the completed Wyeth series, the book explores the mechanisms of influence of one artist upon another—even across media—ranging from subconscious borrowings to more direct appropriations. Using color photography, Welling evokes Wyeth’s aesthetic, particularly the importance of place in his work. Paying homage to Wyeth’s practice of manipulating subject matter in his seemingly realistic paintings, Welling digitally altered his photographs in subtle ways. This book provides a fascinating look at a major new series by a leading contemporary artist, and allows for fresh and insightful connections to Andrew Wyeth.

Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs

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

David Cohen

For the past four decades, Suzan Frecon has become known for abstract oil paintings and watercolors that avoid facile explanations or recognizable visual associations. Instead, compositions integrate color, surface, and light to create an abstract visual reality that she intends to exist solely on its strength as art. In a deliberative and searching process, she works toward painting that provides a complex, powerful, and inexplicable experience for the viewer. As she has stated, “The physical reality and the spiritual content of my paintings are the same.”

 documents Frecon’s third solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, held in 2015, and is the most vivid presentation to date of the artist’s engagement with natural light, the always-varying subtleties of which she integrates into how the painting is created. The focal point of the catalogue is the painstakingly reproduced color plates of fourteen recent paintings, many of which are depicted several times in various types of light and from multiple angles, allowing the reader to experience the work in a way that is more akin to seeing them in person. In addition, it features an illuminating and lively essay by art writer David Cohen, which strives to explain the complexity of viewing and experiencing Frecon’s work. Rounding out the catalogue are numerous details and installation views, atmospheric color photographs of the artist’s studio and materials, and an illustrated visual appendix showing a selection of Frecon’s reference sources for the comprised works, including insightful commentary written by the artist.

Cover of a book titled oil paintings and sun, published by David Zwirner Books in 2015.

Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun

Interview with Raymond Pettibon and Scott Campbell by Alessandro Simonetti

This book is a very intimate conversation where the two artists discuss various unexpected topics such as their respective views on art and life, as well as the memories of their common time spent in jail. It was hosted on June 5th, 2013 by Italian photographer Alessandro Simonetti who simply let the conversation run and added his B&W close ups photographs, making it an overall surprising document.

On jail, art, horse races & boloney sandwiches 

Raymond Pettibon and Scott Campbell

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

Marlene Dumas

Mariska Van Den Berg

Text by Marlene Dumas. Edited by Mariska Van Den Berg

From the beginning, language has played an important role in the work of Marlene Dumas. Her earliest collages make use of text, and she often writes poetical monikers or captions directly onto her drawings, such as “The Eyes of the Night Creatures” or “Miss Interpreted.” Over the last 30 years, the artist has written texts ranging from aphorisms, statements and short poetic pieces to longer analytical essays. Her writing focuses on her own work, discussing its subject matter, its politics, background and source material, as well as its critical reception and her own cultural position as an artist. “I am always ‘not from here,” she writes in one text (a poem), “even though I try to know or understand ‘what’s going on’ and what the rules are and how they keep on changing and what that means. When looking at images I’m not lost, but I’m uneasy.”

, originally published in a long out-of-print (and rare) Dutch edition in 1998 and now revised and expanded, provides a selection of her best and most representative writings from 1982–2014.

Notes and Texts 1982–2014

Marlene Dumas: Sweet Nothings

is a limited edition zine published on the occasion of the artist's exhibition at the New York Art Book Fair 2015. Printed digital offset in an edition of 250 numbered copies, this publication was composed by Dzama and includes a selection of recent collages and etchings, as well as film stills from 

Une danse des bouffons (or A jester's dance)

Marcel Dzama: Death Disco Issue 1

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

Colin Chinnery

Will Self

This book brings together the most recent work by Luc Tuymans. It will be shown in the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh in the autumn of 2015. 

 shows Tuymans’s fascination with the Scottish Enlightenment and its thinkers, who believed in the ability of humans to shape their future rationally and whose influence extended as far as the United States. Stimulated by a visit to the art collection of the University of Edinburgh, Tuymans did three small portraits of Scottish philosophers, originally painted by the eighteenth-century portrait artist Henry Raeburn. The theme of the Enlightenment is combined with menacing horror: in a monumental dark work, 

, or in the portrait of the murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa. The British writer Will Self wrote a remarkable short story for 

, and the art critic Colin Chinnery has contributed an explanatory essay.

Luc Tuymans: Birds of a Feather

A painting by Lisa Yuskavage titled Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture, dated 2018-2020

Lisa Yuskavage, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Christopher Bedford

Suzanne Hudson

Catherine Lord

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Katy Siegel

Texts by Christopher Bedford, Suzanne Hudson, Catherine Lord, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Katy Siegel

Accompanying a major exhibition, this stunning survey and important monograph highlights more than two decades worth of Lisa Yuskavage’s brilliant and controversial paintings. Internationally acclaimed American painter Lisa Yuskavage is known for her seductive yet unsettling work, in which cartoony, vulgar, angelic, young nymphs are cast within fantastical landscapes or theatrical interiors. In this dazzling monograph she presents the confrontational imagery, luscious paint, and technical virtuosity that are her signature, blurring the boundaries between high art's classic female nudes and their popular culture counterparts.

This comprehensive new volume offers a rich overview of the artist’s work with interpretive essays by leading art historians and an interview with the artist. This will be the definitive book on this important artist.

Paintings 1991–2015

Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood

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

Robert Storr

Angela Choon

Text by Robert Storr. Interview with the artist by Angela Choon

With a career spanning almost three decades, Kerry James Marshall is well known for his complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes, all of which synthesize different traditions and genres while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society. Working across various mediums, from paintings and comic-style drawings to sculptural installations, photographs, and videos, the artist conflates actual and imagined events from African-American history, integrating a range of stylistic influences to address the limited historiography of black art.

Produced on the occasion of Marshall’s first exhibition at David Zwirner in London in 2014 and designed by JNL Design in Chicago, 

 features beautiful reproductions of every painting on view in the show as well as numerous details, preparatory drawings, installation photographs, new scholarship by Robert Storr and a conversation between the artist and Angela Choon, a Senior Partner at the gallery. As suggested by the show’s title, these portraits use the etymological differences between looking and seeing as their point of departure, featuring subjects whose dissociated stares seem as defiant as they are mystifying. In keeping with his signature approach, Marshall has painted his figures in strikingly opaque black pigments, both fashioning and abstracting their presences in order to assimilate the limitations and contradictions of style, subject, and chronology inherent in art-historical narratives written from a white, Western perspective. Taken all together, the range of materials included in 

 constitutes a vibrant and comprehensive portrait of Marshall’s original and ever-evolving practice.

Kerry James Marshall: Look See

Yve-Alain Bois

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Diedrich Diederichsen

Hal Foster

Isa Genzken

Isabelle Graw

Lisa Lee

Pamela Lee

Birgit Pelzer

Juliane Rebentisch

Josef Strau

Lawrence Weiner

Texts by Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hal Foster, Isa Genzken, Isabelle Graw, Lisa Lee, Pamela M. Lee, Birgit Pelzer, Juliane Rebentisch, Josef Strau, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lawrence Weiner

Since the late 1970s, the Berlin-based contemporary artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948) has produced a body of work that is remarkable for its formal and material inventiveness. In her sculptural practice, Genzken has developed an expanded material repertoire that includes plaster, concrete, epoxy resin, and mass-produced objects that range from action figures to discarded pizza boxes. Her heterogeneous assemblages, a 

 critic observes, are “brash, improvisational, full of searing color and attitude.” Genzken, the recent subject of a major retrospective at MoMA, offers a highly original interpretation of modernist, avant-garde, and postminimalist practices even as she engages pressing sociopolitics and economic issues of the present.

These illustrated essays address the full span of Genzken’s work, from the elegant floor sculptures with which she began her career to the assemblages, bursting with color and bristling with bric-a-brac, that she has produced since the beginning of the millennium. The texts, by writers including Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and the artist herself, consider her formation in the West German milieu; her critique of conventions of architecture, reconstruction, and memorialization; her sympathy with mass culture; and her ongoing interrogation of public and private spheres. Two texts appear in English for the first time, including a quasi-autobiographical screenplay written by Genzken in 1993.

The first major catalogue published in English on the work of Korean group Dansaekhwa, who variously experimented with pushing paint, soaking canvases, dragging pencils, ripping paper, and other material manipulations. The exhibition was held at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2014 and included artists Chung Sang-hwa, Ha Chonghyun, Kwon Young-woo, Lee Ufan, Park Seobo, and Yun Hyong-keun. The catalogue features an essay by Joan Kee, translations of key articles about the group, and beautiful new illustrations.

From All Sides: Tansaekhwa On Abstraction

Mark Godfrey

Roxana Marcoci

Text by Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, Christopher Williams, and Matthew S. Witkovsky

Representing Christopher Williams’s first publication with a major American museum, this illuminating and unusual volume is equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Williams (b. 1956) has crafted photographs that engage—often through uncanny mimicry—the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, and commercial imagery, as well as their sociopolitical contexts and implications. The book includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky, which explore Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with the methods and modes of display and publicity in the art world, in addition to a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain. These more conventional contributions are “interrupted” by additional historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself and are occasionally presented in facsimile form. An exhibition history, bibliography, and illustrated list of works round out the publication.

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Katherine Brinson

Massimiliano Gioni

Karen Marta

Edited by Karen Marta and Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Katherine Brinson.

Since the mid-1990s, Chris Ofili's painstakingly crafted paintings and sculptures have dazzled—and often distressed—viewers with a fusion of opposing forces: sacred meets profane, formal bows to demotic, and exalted bleeds into vulgar. Paintings of rare beauty are propped on elephant dung; deities squat to defecate; and lovers embrace and yet are forcibly bound.

 series is authored by Katherine Brinson, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where she curated the museum's 2013 Christopher Wool retrospective and also organizes the Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial award honoring significant achievement in contemporary art.

Chris Ofili: 2000 Words

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

Robert Kudielka

Natalia Naish

Alexandra Tommasini

Text by Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini. Interview by Robert Kudielka

Tracking a transitional period of Bridget Riley’s career, the works on paper in this volume move from the vertical stripe to increasingly complex diagonal compositions. During the mid-1980s, Riley introduced a new pictorial device – the rhomboid – to the then predominantly vertical stripes, developing her exploration of interplaying tones of green, yellow and orange. Riley constructs new visual relationships between divergent colors and forms within these works, creating what the artist terms a ‘harmony of contrasts’ that animates the entire visual field. Illustrated in full color, the works are accompanied by a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka and a text by Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini, which situate these studies with major paintings during this period.

Bridget Riley: Studies 1984-95

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Jeremy Lewison

Claire Messud

Texts by Jeremy Lewison and Claire Messud

Drawing was a fundamental, stand-alone component of Alice Neel’s practice, persistently pursued alongside painting, for which she is primarily known. As a medium, it enabled her to capture the immediacy of her visual experience—whether in front of her sitters or on the city streets—while also affording her a greater sense of experimentation and informality. Neel chose the subjects for both her paintings and drawings from her family, friends, and a broad variety of fellow New Yorkers: writers, poets, artists, students, textile salesmen, cabaret singers, and homeless bohemians. Through her penetrative, forthright, and at times humorous touch, her work subtly engaged with political and social issues, including gender, racial inequality, and labor struggles. Not initially intended for public view, her drawings reveal a more private and intimate nature than her paintings and as such reflect her deep sensitivity to these subjects. Yet they are far from sentimental and she readily stripped her sitters of their masks, foregrounding rather the incongruous, the awkward, and, at times, the comical.

Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors 1927-1978 

presents an illuminating overview of the variety of themes and styles employed by the artist across five decades. Published to coincide with an 

 at David Zwirner in New York, the book contains over sixty color plates organized thematically and includes works selected from throughout her career. In addition, it features essays by the independent curator and writer Jeremy Lewison and the award-winning novelist Claire Messud, as well as a selected chronological biography and illustrated list of works.

Although Neel’s influences and style changed from decade to decade, her profound commitment to her subjects and to her art remained consistent over the course of her career, and although the appearance of many of her sitters changed over the years, there is a timeless quality to the works. As Claire Messud notes in her reflections on the artist in the exhibition catalogue, “The complex emotions Neel evokes in her art are nothing less than the contradictions of life itself.”

Alice Neel: Drawings and Watercolors 1927-1978

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