Nikita Gale

Daphne A. Brooks

Ebony L. Haynes

Andrea Fraser

Harmony Holiday

Clarion

Introduction by Ebony L. Haynes. Texts by Andrea Fraser and Harmony Holiday. Liner notes by Daphne A. Brooks

 series spotlights the artist Nikita Gale, whose multimedia work applies the lens of material culture to examine the role authority plays in political, social, and economic systems.



Immersing the audience in sound and light, Nikita Gale’s 

 subverts understandings of viewership by prompting spectators to question their subjecthood within 52 Walker’s site-specific installation. Creating an aurally and visually rich environment, Gale engages with the architecture of the space, stimulating all senses, and muses on the boundaries of performance art. Considering and fracturing the physical space of the installation, the artist employs abolitionist ideology and institutional critique to simultaneously rupture and rebuild facets of the art institution.

With an introduction by Ebony L. Haynes and a suite of poems by Harmony Holiday, this publication considers Gale’s multidisciplinary approach in addressing historical hierarchies of visibility. A text by the esteemed artist Andrea Fraser offers reflections on the various interventions at play during a gathering held in the exhibition.

Nikita Gale: END OF SUBJECT

A detail from a painting by Portia Zvavahera, titled This is where I travelled [3], dated 2020.

Portia Zvavahera, Ndirikukuona (I can see you), 2021

Allie Biswas

Meredith Brown

Text by Meredith A. Brown. Interview with the artist by Allie Biswas

Expressive and rich paintings by the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera—made during a time of intense solitude and collective struggle across the globe.



In her paintings, Zvavahera gives form to emotions that manifest from other realms and dimensions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss.

Zvavahera draws from a powerful visual vocabulary comprising women, her family, and shape-shifting animals, in scenes both metaphorical and fantastical. In several paintings, she makes use of intricate patterns taken from her own floral or classical Zimbabwean designs. Her particular process of alternating painting and printing results in images that communicate complex emotions in a play of tension and release. The result is a deeply personal body of work that probes the nature of the human condition. As Zvavahera states, “It is me in the paintings.… I can only speak about myself.”

In addition to gorgeous reproductions of twenty-four paintings, including up-close details and installation views, this catalogue also features a new essay by the curator Meredith Brown and an interview with the artist by the writer Allie Biswas. This catalogue surveys work made since 2017.

Portia Zvavahera

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

Éric de Chassey

Renowned British artist Bridget Riley’s paintings have provoked powerful sensations through their formally taut, abstract compositions over the course of her more than six-decade career. In this new body of work, Riley returns to earlier ideas and takes them into further and surprising directions.



As the artist has noted, “I am sometimes asked ‘What is your objective’ and this I cannot truthfully answer. I work ‘from’ something rather than ‘towards’ something. It is a process of discovery.” Since 1961, Riley has focused exclusively on seemingly simple geometric forms, such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, arrayed across a surface—whether a canvas, a wall, or paper—according to an internal logic. The resulting compositions actively engage the viewer, at times triggering sensations of vibration and movement. In the present selection, Riley advances her 

 series, her most extensive body of work to date, into a new, darker color palette—once again, changing the way we look and offering a powerful effect on our eyes.

This sense of dynamism was explored to great effect in the artist’s earliest black-and-white paintings, which established the basis of her enduring formal vocabulary. In 2020, after visiting her own earlier works at her retrospective exhibition organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, Riley returned to black-and-white lozenges, adjusting the orientation of each shape to create a new visual sensation.

Published on the occasion of the 2021 exhibition at David Zwirner, London, this monograph features new scholarship on the artist by art historian Éric de Chassey, who looks at how Riley’s past, in addition to the history of art, has led to this body of work.

Bridget Riley: Past into Present

Thomas Ruff: Tableaux Chinois, Walther Koenig, 2022

An ingenious photographic analysis of Chinese propaganda across two photo technologies

In the early 2000s, Thomas Ruff (born 1958) chanced across a coffee-table propaganda book on Mao Zedong and became interested in the visual rhetoric of Chinese Communism, eventually purchasing copies of 

—the French iteration of a periodical that the Chinese Communist Party produced from the late 1950s through the 1970s as a means of demonstrating the advantages of Communism to European countries.
Ruff scanned images from 

 depicting cheerful soldiers, scenic views, ceremonial occasions and Mao himself, enlarging them to reveal the offset halftone dots, then duplicating the image and converting it into pixels; that image was then layered over the original scan, from which Ruff removed various areas. The final image therefore contains both analog halftone and digital pixel. As Susanne Holschbach observes, “Ruff has visually merged the technological process of preparing photographs for their mass distribution from the two photographic eras on one pictorial plane.”

Thomas Ruff: Tableaux Chinois

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

“Wolfgang Tillmans is not only a great artist, he’s a joyous intellectual whose generosity, wit and good-natured skepticism is political, authentic and playfully profound.” – John Waters

This volume offers a panoramic collection of interviews and writings from an artist for whom language has always been a significant means of creative expression. Arranged chronologically, the assembled texts reflect Tillmans’ thinking on photography, music, politics, nightlife, astronomy, spirituality and activism. The sources are as varied as their content, with statements and conversations that originally appeared in exhibition catalogues rubbing up against social-media posts and song lyrics.

Whether discussing his own work as a photographer or drawing out the thoughts of others, Tillmans is a generous interlocutor with a refreshing clarity of thought. This visually rich and timely publication tracks Tillmans’ contributions to art and cultural criticism in tandem with the social and cultural shifts of the past 30 years.

Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear book cover

Edited by Roxana Marcoci. With contributions by Quentin Bajac, Yve-Alain Bois, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Clément Chéroux, Durga Chew-Bose, Stuart Comer, Keller Easterling, Paul Flynn, Sophie Hackett, Michelle Kuo, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Phil Taylor, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Andrew Vielkind

Encompassing photography, installation, print media, video and more, this publication is the most comprehensive account of Tillmans's wide-ranging career to date

A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures and deepen the viewer's experience.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Tillmans's work at the Museum of Modern Art, this copiously illustrated volume surveys four decades of the artist's career. An outstanding group of writers offer diverse essays addressing key threads of his multifaceted practice, and a new text by Tillmans himself elucidates the distinctive methodology behind his system of presenting photographs. 

 fear grants readers new insight into the work of an artist who has not only changed the way photography is exhibited but pointed contemporary art in dynamic new directions.

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, The Museum of Modern Art, 2022

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear

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

This cahier is a visual sketchbook for an exhibition by Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, in dialogue with the museum's collection. Although the exhibition has been postponed towards 2025, this anticipatory publication already arose from Dumas' enthusiasm and affection for this combination. The enigmatic Cycladic antiquities, dating from 3000-2000 BC, speak to us in the same timeless language as Dumas' contemporary works.


Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues

brings the world’s leading contemporary artists together with William Shakespeare. Featuring covers designed by each artist and illustrations throughout, these editions of Shakespeare’s plays are created with a whole new generation in mind, one of readers and art lovers alike.

 is an ideal subject for the artist Rose Wylie, whose work frequently references classic stories and well-known characters.

William Shakespeare x Marcel Dzama: A Midsummer Nights Dream

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.

William Shakespeare x Chris Ofili: Othello

 remains one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlights the tragedy of 

’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has.

Shakespeare book series featuring three titles

The Seeing Shakespeare Collection

Rachel Kushner

Robert Slifkin

Texts by Rachel Kushner and Robert Slifkin

A selection of nearly one hundred previously unseen images from the 1960s and 1970s by the pioneer of color photography, William Eggleston.

, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist’s lens: vibrant colors and a profound sense of nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston’s breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images—a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist’s grandmother in the moody interior of their family’s Sumner, Mississippi home—

 is emblematic of Eggleston’s dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.

Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston’s oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.

William Eggleston: The Outlands, Selected Works

Romaine Brooks

Lauren O’Neill-Butler

ekphrasis

By Romaine Brooks. Introduction by Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Selections from Romaine Brooks’s unpublished memoir 

 expose the psyche and practice of this underrecognized queer, female artist.

Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubing their subjects—often women—Brooks gave personhood and power to the figures she painted. Her frank approach to her complicated relationship with her mother, faith, wealth, sexuality, and gender is complemented by a keen wit that echoes the gray tones of her work.

Though her paintings are held in major collections, Brooks’s influence in modernist circles of the early twentieth century is largely underexplored. This new publication, guided by Brooks’s own impressionistic musings, bridges an important gap between the art and the artist. An introduction by Lauren O’Neill-Butler explores Brooks’s role as an artist in the early twentieth century through the lens of gender and sexuality.

Strange Impressions

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

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

Makeda Best

Taylor Davis

Ruth Erickson

Briony Fer

Helen Molesworth

Jennifer L. Roberts

John Yau

Text by Helen Molesworth. Contributions by Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau

Revealing rarely seen work alongside her iconic looped-wire sculptures, this catalogue celebrates Ruth Asawa’s unique vision and intimate subject matter.

Known for her intricate and distinct artistic language, Asawa produced numerous sculptures, drawings, and prints that are built on simple, repeated gestures that accumulate into complex compositions. Her works on paper and “continuous” looped-wire sculptures suggest a field of fluctuating positive and negative forms, a means of reshaping how we perceive the world. Personal motifs reappear throughout in the most comprehensive look at the artist’s oeuvre to date––ceramic casts of faces of her family, friends, and neighbors; the carved front door Asawa and her family made for their home; and drawings of her children, grandchildren, and husband sleeping––all providing an expansive look into the artist’s life.

A document of the breathtaking and surprising exhibition 

, organized by Helen Molesworth, this book records and expands upon the show, offering new insight from writers and curators with a selection of sixty-four works from Asawa’s spectacular oeuvre. With an essay by Molesworth, this book also features focused texts from Makeda Best, Taylor Davis, Ruth Erickson, Briony Fer, Jennifer L. Roberts, and John Yau.

Ruth Asawa: All Is Possible

Alexandre Kojève

Boris Groys

By Alexandre Kojève. Introduction by Boris Groys

 explores Alexandre Kojève’s philosophical approach to the relationship between art and beauty.

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojève defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,” endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojève suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojève’s text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted question: What is beauty?

Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojève’s life and writings.

Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty

Trailer Video

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

Max Rosenberg

Texts by 55 authors, including Hilton Als, A. D. Coleman, Holland Cotter, Jacob Deschin, Germaine Greer, Hilton Kramer, Arthur Lubow, Janet Malcolm, Francine Prose, Sukhdev Sandhu, Peter Schjeldahl, Adrian Searle, Susan Sontag, Lynne Tillman, and Colm Tóibín

Edited by Max Rosenberg. Foreword by Jeffrey Fraenkel and Lucas Zwirner

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

Best known for her penetrating images exploring what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singularfigure in American postwar photography. Arbus’s black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach. Critics and writers have described her work as “sinister” and “appalling” as well as “revelatory,” “sincere,” and “compassionate.” Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, 

 charts the reception of the revolutionary photographer's work.

Illuminating fifty years of evolution in the field of art criticism, 

 provides a new template for understanding the work of any formidable artist. Organized in eleven sections that focus on major exhibitions and significant events emerging from Arbus’s work, as well as on her methods and intentions, the sixty-nine facsimiles of previously published articles and essays––an archive by all accounts––trace the discourse on Arbus, contextualizing her inimitable oeuvre. Supplemented by an annotated bibliography of more than six hundred entries and a comprehensive exhibition history, 

 serves as an important resource for photographers, researchers, art historians, and art critics, in addition to students of art criticism and the interested reader alike.

, Conversation Between Max Rosenberg & Jarrett Earnest, December 14, 2022

“This book is such a gift to future thinking and future writing, not just about Arbus or about photography, but about post-war American culture, the arts scene, and how to write.”
—Jarrett Earnest

“You could only assemble a book like this about a great artist. Only a great artist could sustain this level of discourse by some of the great writers and thinkers of our time.”
—Jarrett Earnest

Photograph of cover of book titled  Diane Arbus Documents, published by David Zwirner Books/Fraenkel Gallery in 2022

Diane Arbus Documents

Text by Reid Shier with contributions by Erika Balsom, Ma’an Abu Taleb, George E. Lewis, and Samir Gandesha

Stan Douglas, one of the most compelling voices in Canadian contemporary art, has long explored critical, sociocultural, and political change. His exhibition for the 59th Biennale di Venezia, 

, reflects upon the language of protest, revolution, and the uprisings witnessed across the globe in 2011. Douglas’ four large-scale hybrid documentary photographs re-stage protests in Tunis, London, New York, and Vancouver, and his two-channel HD video, 

, presents Grime and Mahraganat rappers exchanging subversive lyrics between studios in London and Cairo.

This stunning 288-page illustrated catalogue, published in English, French, and Arabic, features some 100 full-colour detailed images that meticulously capture behind-the-scenes views of Douglas’ elaborate productions. Essays by leading international cultural thinkers examine the artist’s work in relation to music, political economy, contemporary media theory, and the rise of Grime and Mahraganat.

Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848

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

Edited by Nicole Schweizer. Texts by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Judith Rodenbeck

An art of play, pedestrianism, and participation: on Alys abiding beliefs

Published to accompany a major solo exhibition by Francis Alÿs (born 1959) at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne in 2021, this monograph presents an overview of the Belgian-born artist’s work in video, painting and drawing, with special emphasis on a central theme of his practice, the act of walking. At the intersection of art, architecture and social practice, his artworks explore urban tensions and the geopolitical stakes of the spaces he explores. From urban strolls to exploring territories and their borders, Alÿs chronicles everyday rituals, habits and experiences through poetic films and works on paper. Among the many projects highlighted in this publication are Alÿs' works related to his Afghan experience and his 

 series in which the imaginary spaces of childhood join the artist's poetics of space. Edited and introduced by MCBA Lausanne curator Nicole Schweizer, the book features essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Professor of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley; Luis Pérez-Oramas, independent curator and writer, New York; and Judith Rodenbeck, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside.

Francis Alÿs: As Long as I'm Walking

Edited by Manuel Fontán del Junco and María Toledo. Texts by Alex Bacon, Manuel Fontán del Junco, Pepe Karmel, Prudence Peiffer, Miguel Peña, Jordi Teixidor, María Toledo, José María Yturralde, and Lynn Zelevansky

The first retrospective in 30 years on the immensely influential abstractionist, theorist, art-world scourge and forefather of minimalism

The first monographic exhibition on the artist in Spain and one of the most complete surveys ever curated in Europe, 

Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else

 illustrates Ad Reinhardt’s tremendous influence on abstract expressionism as well as subsequent contemporary art styles. Reinhardt’s paintings are rarely representational and are instead composed of geometrics and eventually only color: canvases of all red, all blue, all black.

Organized with the institutional support of the Ad Reinhardt Foundation, this catalog includes a selection of approximately 50 paintings and works on paper, spanning Reinhardt’s career from early drawings, paintings and collages to later works characterized by a progressive reduction of color and form. Another focal point of the volume is Reinhardt’s passions and artistic pursuits beyond painting, including his slides, writings on art, illustrations in newspapers, books, magazines and pamphlets, and his comics satirizing the art world and politics.

Ad Reinhardt: Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else

Edited by Édouard Detaille and Willem van Roij

On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation publishes 

. This collection of essays by Foundation staff and collaborators reveals the broad scope of how the nonprofit has carried on the legacy of the Alberses over the years.

After an introduction exploring the Foundation's history, 

 features a wide range of essays by people from around the world who have contributed to the Foundation’s work, such as architects Manuel Herz and Toshiko Mori; designers Paul Smith and Christopher Farr; and curators, museum directors, and staff members. The book is richly illustrated with photos by Iwan Baan, Giovanni Hänninen, and Sofia Verzbolovskis, as well as archival material and art by the Alberses. The heart of the book is devoted to the Foundation’s many donations to international museums, including rarely shown works of art.

In 2005, the Foundation supported the creation of the humanitarian organization Le Korsa, which helps local communities in Senegal, through health services, education, agriculture, and culture programs. Essays about Le Korsa are sure to inspire the art world, public institutions, and philanthropists.

You can go anywhere: Josef & Anni Albers Foundation at 50

Texts by Michael Taussig, Russell Ferguson, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Jean Fisher

A fully updated and expanded edition of the artist's first comprehensive monograph, more than a decade since its original publication

Francis Alÿs examines the patterns of various urban sites before weaving his own fables into their tangled social fabric with wit, sensitivity, and an acutely personal connection to his subject matter. A scene such as a Volkswagen Beetle struggling up a hill or a man pushing a block of ice can carry a message that resonates far beyond the work's simple parameters. As Alÿs puts it, 'Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.'

Revised & Expanded Edition

Francis Alÿs

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

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

Katya Tylevich

A breathtaking selection of Michaël Borremans’s lustrous paintings, this catalogue showcases his technical mastery and creative use of mise-en-scène.

Recalling classical painting, both through technical mastery and choice in subject matter, Borremans’s depictions of the surprising and the bizarre invites a second look. Uncanny scenes of figures looking at blurred acrobatic displays, hooded subjects rendered in Rembrandt-esque lighting, or solemn portraits demonstrate Borremans’s unique vision. In this recent body of work, Borremans continues to draw the viewer in closer with his intimately scaled paintings of mysterious figures in peculiar arenas.

Accessible yet full of rich detail, this pocket-size book features fifteen masterful works offering a mystifying narrative. An illuminating text by Katya Tylevich mines the scenes Borremans sets, conjuring the multidimensionality of the works’ emotional power and their unique place in the lineage of art history.

Michaël Borremans: The Acrobat

Hilma af Klint

Philipp Deines

Julia Voss

By Philipp Deines. Foreword by Julia Voss

A moving biography, told in vivid illustrations, this graphic novel features key moments in the life of Swedish artist and pioneer of abstract painting Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Long underrecognized, af Klint is amid a sensational rediscovery that continues to take art audiences by storm.

Artist Philipp Deines traces the story of now world-famous af Klint’s unique life and groundbreaking oeuvre through five chapters featuring her development as an artist, her family background, and her relationship to the spiritual. Highlighting how she came to her distinctive paintings, her spiritual quest, and the friends who helped her, this is a story of the strength it took af Klint to continue as an artist against all odds.

Beautifully drawn, brightly colored, and well researched, this graphic novel is a new way of looking at the story of an artist. Referencing Julia Voss’s new biography of af Klint, Deines presents an accessible and lively introduction for many ages. Biography, art history, and contemporary narrative style merge and complement each other in this magnificent visual world.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint

John Ashbery

Mónica de la Torre

Jeffrey Lependorf

By John Ashbery. Introduction by Mónica de la Torre. Selections and playlists by Jeffrey Lependorf

An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery—a prolific poet and art critic—pairing poetry and art writings with playlists of music from his personal library.

This book places poetry by Ashbery, gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the “playlists” here present samplings of music from these same years, culled from his own library of recordings. 

Ashbery’s poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem “based on” or “inspired” by the content of an artwork or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many observations from Ashbery’s art writing also provide keys to how we might read his poetry. Many recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases—qualities which are mimicked in his poetry.

In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another. In Mónica de la Torre’s introduction, she explores the connection between the three muses of music, art, and poetry, and the ekphrastic experience of reading Ashbery.

 for a recording of a virtual discussion with 192 Books.

Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists

Katie Kitamura

Seeing Shakespeare

By William Shakespeare. Artwork by Rose Wylie. Introduction by Katie Kitamura

Likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, 

 brings together various themes the Bard explored in his prior plays, including magic, revenge and forgiveness, order and society, and nature versus art. The shipwreck and remote island, the spirits, and the dukes and their children offer rich material for Wylie’s works on paper and canvas.

As the third title in David Zwirner Books’s 

 series, this book pairs a complex narrative with equally layered works by a contemporary artist who approaches the play and art making from a unique perspective. Also included is an introduction by the writer Katie Kitamura.

William Shakespeare × Rose Wylie: The Tempest

1-Up

Jamie Brisick

Brian Lukacher

Emily Erickson

Stephanie Gilmore

Texts by Jamie Brisick and Brian Lukacher. Contributions by Emily Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore

“All this must be either surfed or painted”: This is the underlying sentiment behind Raymond Pettibon’s iconic works of surfers and waves in this quintessential volume dedicated to the motif.

Pettibon is known for his characteristically enigmatic aesthetic and sharply satirical critiques of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low culture. Perhaps most poetic among the many motifs present in Pettibon’s oeuvre is the surfer. In 1985, Pettibon began his series of surfers and waves––which he continues to work on to this day––popular for depicting a lone surfer silently carving “a line of beauty” along an impossibly large wave.

This book spotlights a selection of more than one hundred surfers from the series, from smaller monochromatic works on paper to colorful large-scale paintings applied directly to the wall. For Pettibon’s protagonist in these works, surfing exists apart from all else. Momentarily he achieves sublimity on the wave, distant yet synced with turbulent reality. We are forced to confront our own scale: small and feeble in the face of the power of nature, what is beyond our control. Pettibon’s lyrical writings on these painted surfaces—both his own and lines taken from literature—reference his own philosophies and the confusions of reality: he critiques and highlights the hypocrisies and vanities of the world he engages. To help navigate, the scholar Brian Lukacher explores art-historical antecedents in Pettibon’s work, particularly the seascapes of J. M. W. Turner, and Jamie Brisick, the writer and former professional surfer, examines the Southern California surf and music culture of Pettibon’s youth. Professional big wave surfers Emi Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore also describe the sensory experience of conquering the enormous waves depicted in Pettibon’s works.

Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves

Kandis Williams

Hannah Black

Okwui Okpokwasili

Introduction by Ebony L. Haynes. Text by Hannah Black. Conversation between Kandis Williams and Okwui Okpokwasili

The inaugural volume in a new series of books, 

 documents the Los Angeles–based artist’s exhibition 

. Interrogating issues of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism, her topical work is made across collage, sculpture, and video.



Williams draws on her background in dramaturgy to envision a space that accommodates the biopolitical economies that inform how movement might be read. Looking at the interconnections between popular culture and myth, she relates in her work anatomy, regions of Black diaspora, and communication and obfuscation. Williams’s body of work shapes an alternative language that examines how Black moving bodies are regarded. Williams continues to make visible the inexpressible violence Black bodies have been subjected to in dance and beyond.

Featuring contributions by the curator of 52 Walker—a David Zwirner gallery space—Ebony L. Haynes and the artist and writer Hannah Black, and a stirring conversation between Williams and the artist Okwui Okpokwasili, the book serves as an extension of the exhibition. Included are high-quality illustrations of the artworks alongside rich archival materials.

Kandis Williams: A Line

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David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.