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

Jeffrey Weiss

This publication documents a 2008 exhibition held at Zwirner & Wirth in which the gallery restaged the seminal exhibition of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures that took place in 1964 at Richard Bellamy’s influential Green Gallery on West 57th Street, New York (

The Green Gallery exhibition was groundbreaking not only in terms of its presentation of radically innovative work that used commercially-available, colored fluorescent light, but also because it marked a turning-point in Flavin’s career. While the artist had previously exhibited a series of hand-made, painted wood constructions with lighting elements affixed to them (known as the “icons”), he began creating works made with fluorescent light alone in 1963. The Green Gallery show was the first exhibition composed entirely of fluorescent lights, and thus marked the development of the minimalist language of illumination that would characterize Flavin’s work until his death in 1996.

This catalogue includes 13 plates and features an essay by scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss; statements by Sonja Flavin, Dan Graham, Dorothea Rockburne, Barbara Rose, James Rosenquist, and Brydon Smith; excerpts from Flavin’s journals; and archival photographs and reviews of the original Green Gallery exhibition.

Dan Flavin: The 1964 Green Gallery Exhibition

Ulrich Loock

Robert Storr

Text by Robert Storr. Interview with the artist by Ulrich Loock

Al Taylor was an artist whose intimate view of the world was explored using any media available. Constantly observing whatever was around him, from pet stains on urban streets to styrofoam floats washed up on a Hawaiian beach, he deftly abstracted simple objects and imagery into a unique body of work that is both complex and humorous. Only 51 at the time of his death in 1999, the artist worked as a painter and draftsman until the mid-1980s, when he began constructing three-dimensional pieces to expand the pictorial plane. Approaching his three-dimensional work and drawing with the same whimsical intensity, he willfully dismissed any distinction between these mediums. For Taylor, his “constructions” are spatial drawings that provide a multitude of views. Each work is an investigative mapping of his thoughts and perceptions across several dimensions that configures fluid spaces through the rhythmic movement of his compositions.

Al Taylor: Early Works

A painting by On Kawara, titled MAY 11, 1967, dated 1967.

On Kawara, One Million Years (Past), 1970-1971, Page 2001

Ervin Laszlo

Takafumi Matsui

Charles Wylie

Texts by Ervin Laszlo, Takafumi Matsui, and Charles Wylie

Since the mid-1960s, On Kawara (b. 1933) has objectively recorded his existence through everyday numbers, words, and found images. This handsomely designed and illustrated book presents works selected by the artist from throughout his illustrious career, including paintings made at the time of the 1969 moon landings, other large-scale paintings, a 100 Years Calendar, and a vast array of his own books that chronicle his extensive travels, acquaintances, and personal readings.

The book features a translation of an essay on the Apollo space mission and its impact on human consciousness by Takafumi Matsui; a chapter from Ervin Laszlo’s 

, which presents theories of understanding possible connections between mind and matter; and a new essay by Charles Wylie that discusses the specifics of Kawara’s corresponding installation at the Dallas Museum of Art and Kawara’s contribution to and divergence from the main currents of art practice in the past five decades.

On Kawara: 10 Tableaux and 16,952 Pages

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

Texts by Sarah Eckhardt, Matthias Frehner, Ulrich Loock, and Lawrence Rinder. Interview with the artist by Josef Helfenstein

This is the first major exploration of the works of American abstract painter and watercolorist Suzan Frecon (b. 1941), critically acclaimed for her sensitive arrangement of color, form, and texture, and for the philosophical resonance of her art. By restricting herself to nonrepresentational forms, earth-based colors, and, in the case of her watercolors, “found” pieces of paper, Frecon achieves an unequaled sense of balance and openness in her work. The book features ten oil paintings and thirty watercolors dating from the late 1990s to 2007.

 celebrates the uniqueness of Frecon’s painting and articulates how her work distinguishes itself within the history of abstract painting. The authors describe in-depth how her artistic process and materials are an integral part of her focus and aesthetic. Included is an essay revealing the “ethics” of her aesthetics––an argument for abstraction and an attention to truth that is not divorced from social and environmental concerns.

form, color, illumination: Suzan Frecon painting

One of the seminal artists of contemporary photography, Philip-Lorca diCorcia produces work that exists on a wide spectrum of fictionalized documentary. Yet a thematic and conceptual unity, most often realized in serial form and particularly suited to monograph format marks each series in his oeuvre.

, diCorcia effectively inverts his own tendency: the monograph is now the work itself. The sheer volume of material, which spans over 20 years of personal and artistic creation, shifts notions of context, narrative, and individual perception.
Flipping through the pages of 

 is not so much a retrospective or summation of the artist's life as it is an exercise in the construction of memory. An unwashed pan soaking in the sink precedes an unknown woman resembling an odalisque; the familiar linoleum aisles of a generic supermarket give way to a verdant swatch of lawn. These images are bothalien and deeply familiar, and just as one moment in our lives may recall another, these photos echo among one another, within the book, within the canon of diCorcia's work, and within our personal experience. The Polaroid proves to be the perfect souvenir unique and subject to reinterpretation, like memory itself.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Thousand

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

At just over 430 pages, this monumental and beautifully designed new monograph presents the most comprehensive view of the London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s work to date, featuring many photographic works and abstract “paintings” from the past five years that have never been published before.

When he is working on an exhibition or a publication, Tillmans displays and combines pictures on long tables in his studio so that the images are “held in position only by their own weight. The method of laying out two-dimensional objects on a table produces ‘clarity’ and allows perspective. A new text emerges through the combination of intrinsically different pieces of paper. The issues dealt with on these tables do not claim to be fully comprehensive and the items chosen do not profess to be definitive examples of their kind. Rather, this multivocal process allows me to amplify voices I feel need strengthening, contrasting them with their opposites and their neighbors.” This method has become a concept. In Manual the artist combines his own photographs, painterly works and texts together with already existing newspaper articles to create an associative, comprehensive view. The material is condensed into a complex artistic dialogue with various social and political themes, like AIDS or the question of absolute truth, which the artist has been exploring for years.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Manual

Texts by Kim Levin, Midori Matsui, Lars Nittve, Lars Norén, and Ann-Sofi Noring

The Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson works with dreams, fairy tales, and the details of everyday life. Her passion for storytelling means that every dark maelstrom is scattered with structuring elements: a window, a television, someone looking at a painting. Her early works feature children in vast landscapes, forests, lakes and countryside that echo her own childhood in northern Sweden, (she was born in Luleå in 1962). In later pieces, this rural setting yields to the interiors of the art world–cluttered framers’s workshops, libraries, and elegant salons. Most recently, these rooms have opened up towards new realms, where the finely ornamented objects from Andersson’s gallery scenes seem at home, dreamlike, in the wilderness, with paintings hanging from snowy mountains. Whatever her motifs, the atmosphere is always one of serenity and wonder, a moment of appreciation between finding and forgetting. Today, Andersson is one of Sweden’s most internationally recognized artists, with recent solo exhibitions at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. She represented her country at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was also featured at the 2004 Berlin Biennial and the Sydney Biennial, 2006.

Mamma Andersson

Detail of an oil on linen painting, titled Clear Message, dated 2019.

Interview with the artist by Sophie Aschauer

The work of American artist Josh Smith focuses on themes authenticity and authorship. His paintings, collages, artist books and installations encircle the central myths of modern painting, and connect subjectivities to the exterior world. Josh Smith first became known for his “Name Paintings”, in which his everyman name functions as a pictorial motif for variations—of the painting and signature in one. This publication presents, in two volumes, the artist’s “Abstract Paintings” next to his “Palette Paintings”. Two concepts, two themes, two books: on the one hand, archetypes of abstract-expressionist paintings with airy compositions in lively colors; on the other, canvases onto which Smith squeezes out his paintbrush, with the straightforward aesthetic of simple forms. Both books show how serious reflection can emerge from an aggressive-ironic approach. And how abstract art can emerge out of the ideal, without the need for pathos, artistic genius or over-appreciation of the individual painting. The additional text booklet contains an interview with Sophie Aschauer that broaches these questions, alongside installation views and the “Announcement Paintings” made for 

Josh Smith: Abstraction

Denise Bratton

Lynne Tillman

Edited by Denise Bratton. Text by Lynne Tillman

This concise and beautiful exhibition catalogue features arresting, colorful, Rorschach Test-like photograms of flowers by the esteemed Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, James Welling. For this series, Welling placed the blossoms of a common southern California plant on sheets of 8x10 film and exposed them to light. The negatives were then projected onto special photo paper through a color mural enlarger and color filters, to produce the dramatic, spectral, almost sun- or moon-dappled images reproduced here. Currently a professor of fine art at UCLA, Welling studied at CalArts in the early 1970s. Welling was the subject of a midcareer retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2000, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

James Welling: Flowers

Edited by Juliane Joan Rebentisch. Texts by Vanessa J. Müller, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Liam Gillick

For more than 30 years, the German artist Isa Genzken (born 1948) has been amassing a body of work in sculpture, installation, photography, collage and film. As one of Germany’s brightest stars in the art world, she was well suited to represent her country at the Venice Biennale in 2007, an occasion which this volume commemorates. The title of this book and of her installation at the German pavilion plays with the word’s associations as a global and globally contested resource, through a series of sculptural installations invoking in particular America’s dependence on oil.

German Pavilion in Venice 2007

Isa Genzken: Oil

Text by Pamela M. Lee. Interview with Fred Sandback by Kimberly Davenport

 was published on the occasion of concurrent exhibitions featuring the artist’s sculptures and drawings at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth, New York, in 2006-2007. This extensive monograph presents Sandback’s work from the 1960s and 70s, including a selection of his earliest sculptures made with metal and elastic cord, wall reliefs, and large-scale sculptures as well as a rare group of the artist’s Conceptual Constructions from 1969, which are sculptures of typed text. It also includes an extensive selection of drawings spanning four decades of the artist’s career. Comprising 58 plates, this fully illustrated catalogue includes an essay by art historian Pamela M. Lee and an interview with the artist by curator Kimberly Davenport.

Fred Sandback

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Cameron Shaw

Klaus Kertess

Few artists's names can connote such diverse associations as the Virgin Mary, Rudolph Giuliani and elephant dung. Controversy tends to dog the art of Chris Ofili, and former New York Mayor Giuliani's suspension of funding for the Brooklyn Museum upon its exhibition of his 1996 painting 

 in 1999 was but one instance of the ire Ofili routinely arouses. When these occasional media commotions subside, one sees that the work is actually pleasing in more familiar ways: Ofili's surfaces sparkle with smears of glitter and bright veneer, resembling nothing so much as African icons. But Ofili has always been political, specifically in his confrontations with racial cliché, and in his insistent incorporation of materials from popular black culture. 

 derives its title from singer-songwriter D'Angelo's 1998 lyric meditation on temptation and retribution. According to the song, the ingredients of a devil's pie include "materialistic, greed and lust, jealousy, envious / bread and dough, cheddar cheese, flash and stash, cash and cream." Similarly diverse in its references and dichotomies, Ofili's work contains contradictions. This catalogue collects his work in sculpture, painting, printmaking, and graphite drawing for the first time and includes texts by art writer and curator Klaus Kertess and writer Cameron Shaw.

Chris Ofili: Devil's Pie

Edited by Alex Israel. Text by Kevin West

The installation and interactive performance 

 formed part of the artist’s “Pussy Trilogy,” which also encompassed 

 (2004). Evoking the style of the coffee table social diary, the catalogue documents the events, known as 

, held in the artist’s Los Angeles studio in 2006. Amidst the chrome trolleys, neon signs, dream catchers, cowboy hats, hookah pipes, and camel saddles which partially constitute the installation, guests were invited to contribute to Rhoades’s ongoing project of creating a cross-cultural compendium of euphemisms for female genitalia. Evolving to fit each location, the installation debuted at Hauser & Wirth in 2005 and traveled to David Zwirner in 2007. The catalogue, conceived by and designed in conjunction with the artist, includes a foreword by Kevin West, West Coast editor of 

 magazine, as well as photographs by Joshua White and Alexia Pilat.

Jason Rhoades’ Black Pussy Cocktail Coffee Table Book

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

Interviews by the artist with Ruben Aberjil, Albert Agazarian, Yael Dayan, Jean Fisher, Rima Hamami, Amira Hass, Nazmi Jobeh, Yael Lerer, Eyal Sivan, Michael Warschawski, and Eyal Weizman

Available in hardcover, this catalogue was published on the occasion of Francis Alÿs’s first solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2007. The exhibition presented a film by Alÿs in collaboration with Julien Devaux alongside a map of the artist’s journey, photocollages, paintings, drawings, and a group of sculptures. The film shows Alÿs carrying a dripping can of green paint along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel’s War of Independence ended in 1948. It questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the Green Line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This trilingual exhibition catalogue (English, Hebrew, and Arabic) features interviews conducted by Alÿs with eleven activists, academics, and journalists. Also included are a fold-out map and DVD of the film with options to listen to the recorded interviews.

Out of print

Francis Alÿs: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

This fully illustrated catalogue was published on the occasion of the artist’s third solo exhibition of thirty recent paintings at David Zwirner in 2006 and includes a text by artist Wendy White.

Raoul De Keyser: Recent Work

Josef Helfenstein

Elizabeth Hutton Turner

Jenny Anger

Vivian Endicott Barnett

Michael Baumgartner

Bradford Epley

Christa Haiml

Charles W. Haxthausen

Edited by Josef Helfenstein and Elizabeth Hutton Turner

 accompanies explores the reasons for Paul Klee's enthusiastic reception in the United States, especially during the 1930s and 1940s. While the artist was targeted in Hitler's campaign against "Degenerate Art" and the European market for his work collapsed in 1933, his reputation grew among several key American collectors and museum curators, several of whom laid the groundwork for Klee's later success in the US. These critical early figures included the dealers Galka Scheyer and J.B. Neumann, the collectors Katherine Dreier and Walter and Louise Arensberg, and the founder of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr. Jr. The publication presents an impressive selection of Klee's finest "American" works from that period, including both paintings and drawings.

Exhibition schedule:· Neue Galerie New York, March 10-May 21, 2006 · The Philips Collection, Washington, D.C., June 17-September 10, 2006 The Menil Collection, Houston, October 6, 2006-January 14, 2007

Klee and America

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Manfred Hermes

Texts by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Manfred Hermes

For more than thirty years, Isa Genzken has been developing a versatile oeuvre, continually extending it by adding new aspects. Her settings, her unusual combinations of materials, and the fragile but monumental character of her constructions reflect the surrounding world and the fragility of human existence. Her work—which includes sculptures and installations as well as photography, collage, and film—explores the space between public claims and private artistic autonomy, thus defining an interface where the personal and the universal meet. The formal and conceptual rigor at the root of Isa Genzken’s approach is tempered by unrestricted freedom, producing works that can be interpreted and experienced on very different levels. A central role is played by the choice and combination of materials with different connotations which the artist finds at home depots, builders’ suppliers, and department stores: whereas in the past Genzken used wood, plaster, epoxy resins, and above all concrete, the material of Modernism, her main materials today are plastic, synthetics, and a wide range of mirrors, as well as everyday items and consumer goods such as chairs—design classics alongside cheap camping chairs—garments, and plastic dolls and animals.

For her exhibition in the Hauptraum at the Secession, Isa Genzken has devised an installation with new sculptures and pieces on the wall: wheelchairs and seats draped in various textiles, ribbons, and sheets, walking frames, anthropomorphic figures, and wall-filling collages made from mirrors, photos, and adhesive tape create a carefully arranged image. Warholesque baby dolls with their outsize glasses look like prematurely aged children or, conversely, like infantilized adults, waiting under tattered parasols on a Hollywood set for shooting to recommence. But less than this bizarre scene, what is disconcerting here is the cool precision with which, for all the piece’s figurativeness, no story is told. Dolls and animals form heterogeneous abstract surfaces, but they are not deployed to narrative ends, and neither are other materials such as the mirrors, plastic sheeting, or the paint dripped or sprayed over many of the sculptures.

The new works relate to Genzken’s recent 

 series. But while these works were presented on plinths at eye level, at the Secession, the entire space turns into a kind of plinth and the visitors become part of this scenario that is both beguilingly beautiful and disturbing at the same time. The works turn an imaginary inner space outwards, but rather than being something merely invented, the space always refers to the real—a comparative moment against which all the pieces can be measured. In an interview with Wolfgang Tillmans, Isa Genzken describes the way she thinks a sculpture should look: “It must have a certain relation to reality. I mean, not airy-fairy, let alone fabricated, so aloof and polite. [...] Rather, a sculpture is really a photo – although it can be shifted, it must still always have an aspect that reality has too.”

Isa Genzken

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

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

Hans van Heirseele

 was published on the occasion of the artist’s second solo 

 at David Zwirner in 2006. Amongst the fourteen new paintings on view was the eponymous work 

 (2005), which portrays a young man, fashionably attired, holding two twigs from each of his nostrils. Available in hardcover, this catalogue includes a text by Belgian artist and curator Hans van Heirseele.

Michaël Borremans: Horse Hunting

Portrait of Neo Rauch, 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter.

 was published on the occasion of the artist’s third solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2005. The exhibition presented ten large-scale canvases with an odd assortment of workers, students, military men, and other characters, against backdrops of mundane architecture, industrial settings, or bizarre and often barren landscapes. Also included is a text by Christine Mehring, writer and Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.

Neo Rauch: Renegaten

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

Gerrit Vermeiren

 at David Zwirner in New York, this catalogue was designed by the artist. Featured are ten paintings, many now considered iconic works and in the collections of major museums, which offer a critique of America by laying claim to real events, suppressed memories, and political issues. For Tuymans, each painting presents a fragmented glimpse of a disjointed whole; his aim is to make the audience consider each image, the opposite of each image, and the uncertainty that follows. The exhibition’s title, 

, is in itself an aberration. While it refers to a seemingly requisite order determined by society at large, it simultaneously suggests the opposite – 

– and therefore subverts the notion of correctness as it relates to social and societal expectations.

In a key painting, we are confronted by the cropped, larger-than-life-sized face of Condoleeza Rice. Prompted by a remark made by a Belgian official, in which Rice was described as “strong; not unpretty,” Tuymans’s portrait of the former United States Secretary of State forces us to reevaluate a known public figure within the parameters of the still image. In 

a perfectly-arranged dinner table evokes early Americana. In 

, the image of an empty dance hall underscores a lack of festivity – mediocrity tempered by the absence of dancing – and in 

a single couple sways over the state seal of Texas at the Governor’s Ball. In other paintings, it is the sense that something has just happened, or is about to, that suggests a fragile or ephemeral state – the eerie face of a Medieval statue; the dust cloud following the demolition of a building, with a New York City street lamp barely visible; an oval mirror reflecting a solitary lamp; the top of a canopy bed in which the cropped composition is eerily reminiscent of the water line from a flood. In the painting entitled 

, we are reminded by a tiny red light that, at any moment, things can go terribly wrong – or, at the very least, that change is inevitable.

Luc Tuymans: Proper

Jason Rosenfeld

Jason Tougaw

Texts by Jason Rosenfeld and Jason Tougaw

Published on the occasion of his fourth solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2005, this beautifully designed and produced catalogue—with essays by curator and art historian Jason Rosenfeld and writer Jason Tougaw—features Marcel Dzama’s most recent drawings, costumes, sculptures, and notebook pages. The title, 

, is borrowed from the poet Dante and recalls both grandiose artistic and literary cycles from the nineteenth century such as the New York Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole’s five-painting 

, where nature plays as large a role as humans. In Dzama’s art, personification has always been the main leitmotif—imagined characters and trees and beasts assume base human characteristics. The catalogue also includes a unique fold out designed by the artist.

Marcel Dzama: The Course of Human History Personified 

Chris Burden

Chris Burden: Early Work

Shiuji Inomata

Jean-Luc Nancy

Osho

Texts by Shiuji Inomata, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Osho

 was published on the occasion of the artist’s third solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2004, which presented a selection of date paintings, one from each of the past forty years. Also known as the 

 series, the artist began making his now signature date paintings in New York City on January 4, 1966. Available in hardcover, this catalogue includes texts by Japanese scientist Shiuji Inomata; French philosopher Jean Luc-Nancy; and Indian spiritual leader Osho.

On Kawara: Paintings of 40 Years

A portrait of Gerhard Richter by Werner Bartsch.

Jean-Philippe Antoine

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at Zwirner & Wirth:


Gerhard Richter: Landscapes

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