Virginia Woolf

Claudia Tobin

ekphrasis

By Virginia Woolf. Introduction by Claudia Tobin

 series, this collection of Virginia Woolf’s writings on the visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.

Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, and in the artists and art critics in her Bloomsbury circle, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This volume collects her longest essay on painting, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), alongside shorter essays and reviews, including “Pictures and Portraits” (1920) and “Pictures” (1925).

These formally inventive texts reveal the centrality of the visual arts to Woolf’s writing and vision. They show her engaging with contemporary debates about modern art and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and form, including in response to the work of her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, who designed many of her book covers and jackets. In these essays and reviews, Woolf illuminates the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society, and reveals her own shifting perspectives during decades of social and political change. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and on the relationship between art and writing.

An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.

Oh, to Be a Painter!

Mamma Andersson, 2023. Photo by Pierre Björk

Karl Ove Knausgaard

This volume celebrates the Swedish artist Mamma Andersson’s new body of work—melancholic, evocatively colored paintings that explore femininity, fantasy, and memory.

Andersson’s works embody a new genre of landscape painting that recalls late nineteenth-century romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions. Her panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up. The paintings utilize a selection of motifs from throughout her career: barren branches and thick-barked pine trees, domestic interiors, horses, and young women. Resembling still lifes, they further a tradition of quiet, dreamlike domestic scenes by Scandinavian artists such as Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944). Part of a self-conscious effort to capture an experience rather than a specific event, the compositions are freer and more abstract and mark a departure from her earlier work.

Splendid color reproductions bring the artist’s textured brushstrokes, loose washes, and stark graphic lines to life on the page. The book also features a new essay by critically acclaimed author Karl Ove Knausgaard. 

 is published on the occasion of an eponymous exhibition presented at David Zwirner New York in 2020.

Mamma Andersson: The Lost Paradise

Doro Globus

Rose Blake

By Doro Globus and Rose Blake. Illustrated by Rose Blake

An exciting insight into the workings of artists and museums, Making a Great Exhibition is a colorful and playful introduction geared to children ages 3 to 7.

How does an artist make a sculpture or a painting? What tools do they use? What happens to the artwork next? This fun, inside look at the life of an artwork shows the journey of two artists’ work from studio to exhibition. Stopping along the way we meet colorful characters—curators, photographers, shippers, museum visitors, and more!

Both illustrator and author were raised in the art world, spending their time in studios, doing homework in museum offices, and going to special openings. They have teamed up to share their experiences and love for this often mysterious world to a young audience. London-based illustrator Rose Blake is best known for her work in 

, by David Hockney and Martin Gayford, which has been a worldwide success. Author Doro Globus brings her love for the arts and kids together with this fun journey.

Interior spread, Making a Great Exhibition, David Zwirner Books, 2024

Making a Great Exhibition

A painting by Giorgio Morandi titled Natura morta (Still Life), dated 1956.

Laura Mattioli

David Leiber

Heinz Liesbrock

Nicholas Fox Weber

Text by Laura Mattioli. Conversation between David Leiber, Heinz Liesbrock, and Nicholas Fox Weber

An unprecedented catalogue exploring the formal and visual affinities and contrasts between Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi—two of modern art’s greatest painters.

Rarely seen together, the artwork of Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) shares many similarities. Although they never met, both artists worked in series as they explored difference and potential through their distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, and morphology. They were also both influenced by Cezanne. As master illusionists and experts in proportion, they tackle similar conceits from different perspectives. Albers focused on the effects of subtle or bold changes and interactions in color, while Morandi made still lifes that treat simple objects as a cast of characters on a stage, exploring their relationship in space.

Published on the occasion of the critically acclaimed exhibition 

, the book illuminates the visual conversation between these two artists. With the exhibition hailed by 

’s Peter Schjeldahl as “one of the best … I’ve ever seen,” this publication brings this unusual, thought-provoking pairing to your home. Gorgeous reproductions are accompanied by a roundtable about form and color between the exhibition’s curator, David Leiber; Heinz Liesbrock, the director of the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany; and Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, as well as an essay by the Morandi expert and founder of the Center for Italian Modern Art, Laura Mattioli.

Albers and Morandi: Never Finished

Zhu Zhu

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Text by Zhu Zhu. Translated by Denis Mair. Interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Chinese artist Liu Ye’s meticulous, colorful canvases convey his love of literature in the first publication dedicated to his paintings of books.



Beijing-born painter Liu Ye (b. 1964) investigates the intersections of history and representation through a distinct vocabulary that transcends time and place, evoking distinct conceptual and emotional registers of meaning. Carefully balanced and lushly rendered, his works encompass a diverse range of aesthetic and cultural sources, from literary and artistic inspirations to his family and pets. In this new publication devoted to his book paintings, the artist examines the book as both a physical object and cultural totem. Playing with geometry and perspective, Liu creates extraordinary and disorienting portraits of this most familiar subject.

Liu’s 

 series, begun in 2013, depicts close-up views of books that are turned open to reveal empty pages, an approach that emphasizes the object’s form over its content. Rendering books’ material structure—endpapers, binding, spine—in sensual detail, these paintings indicate an obsession with the book as an object and a lifelong love of literature. Liu’s father was a children’s book author who introduced him to Western writers at a young age, fueling his curiosity and imagination. Many of the books in Liu’s father’s collection were banned in Cultural Revolution–era China and the artist read them secretly throughout his childhood. This formative experience figures in his popular 

 series and in his book paintings in general.

Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020, this catalogue includes new writing by the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu, who traces the evolution of the book form in Liu’s work, as well as an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Liu Ye: The Book Paintings

Charles Baudelaire

Michael Fried

By Charles Baudelaire. Introduction by Michael Fried

In his introduction to Charles Baudelaire’s 

, the renowned art historian Michael Fried presents a new take on the French poet and critic’s ideas on art, criticism, romanticism, and the paintings of Delacroix.

Charles Baudelaire, considered a father of modern poetry, wrote some of the most daring and influential prose of the nineteenth century. Prior to publishing the international bestseller 

 (1857), he was already notable as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. Captivated by the Salons in Paris, Baudelaire took to writing to express his theories on modern art and art philosophy.

 expands upon the tenets of romanticism as Baudelaire methodically takes his reader through paintings by Delacroix and Ingres, illuminating his belief that the pursuit of the ideal must be paramount in artistic expression. Here we also see Baudelaire caught in a fundamental struggle with the urban commodity of capitalism developing in Paris at that time. Baudelaire’s text proves to be a useful lens for understanding art criticism in mid-nineteenth-century France, as well as the changing opinions regarding the essential nature of romanticism and the artist as creative genius.

Acclaimed art historian and art critic Michael Fried’s introduction offers a new reading of Baudelaire’s seminal text and highlights the importance of his writing and its relevance to today’s audience.

The Salon of 1846

Rudolf Zwirner

Nicola Kuhn

Gérard Goodrow

Lucas Zwirner

By Rudolf Zwirner, written with Nicola Kuhn. Translated by Gérard Goodrow. Edited by Lucas Zwirner. Foreword by Lucas Zwirner

Rudolf Zwirner, “the man who invented the art market,” as coined in Der Spiegel, reflects on more than sixty years in the art business in his authoritative autobiography.

An art dealer of the ages, Rudolf Zwirner, father of the esteemed gallerist David Zwirner, reached many milestones in his career. From cofounding Art Cologne, the first fair for contemporary art, in 1967, to showing works by Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol, Zwirner transformed the contemporary art scene in Cologne. Born in 1933, he presented more than three hundred exhibitions from the early 1960s to 1992. In his autobiography, Zwirner reveals stories of artists, his gallery, and his most important collector, Peter Ludwig, whose collection forms the cornerstone of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

First published in 2019 in German, and translated and adapted here for the first time in English, the book explores the most significant moments of Zwirner’s career and the fast-changing postwar art world. Also included in this edition is a new introduction by Lucas Zwirner, Rudolf’s grandson, who reflects on his grandfather’s role in bringing us to the global art landscape we find ourselves in now.

An Autobiography

Rudolf Zwirner: Give Me the Now

Midnight Tears, 2023. © Yoshitomo Nara. Collection of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The definitive book on the life and career of internationally acclaimed artist Yoshitomo Nara

Yoshitomo Nara rose to prominence in the mid-1990s, a star in a generation of avant-garde Japanese artists associated with the neo-Pop "Superflat" movement. This book, made in close collaboration with Nara himself, explores more than three decades of his work and is the first truly authoritative monograph on the artist in more than a decade. Written by art historian Yeewan Koon and featuring texts by Nara himself, it includes his most recent work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics.

Yoshitomo Nara

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

Edited by Timothy Anglin Burgard and Daniell Cornell

An expanded edition of the definitive book on Ruth Asawa’s fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art.



The work of American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) is brought into brilliant focus in this definitive book, originally published to accompany the first complete retrospective of Asawa’s career, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2006. This new edition features an expanded collection of essays and a detailed illustrated chronology that explore Asawa's fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. Beginning with her earliest works—drawings and paintings created in the 1940s while she was studying at Black Mountain College—this beautiful volume traces Asawa’s flourishing career in San Francisco and her trajectory as a pioneering modernist sculptor who is recognized internationally for her innovative wire sculptures, public commissions, and advocacy on behalf of public arts education.

Through her lifelong experimentations with wire, especially its capacity to balance open and closed forms, Asawa invented a powerful vocabulary that contributed a unique perspective to the field of twentieth-century abstract sculpture. Working in a variety of nontraditional media, Asawa performed a series of remarkable metamorphoses, leading viewers into a deeper awareness of natural forms by revealing their structural properties. Through her art, Asawa transfigured the commonplace into metaphors for life processes themselves.

establishes the importance of Asawa’s work within a larger cultural context of artists who redefined art as a way of thinking and acting in the world, rather than as merely a stylistic practice.

This updated edition includes a new introduction and more than fifty new images, as well as original essays that reflect on the impact of American political history on Asawa's artistic vision, her experience with printmaking, and her friendship with photographer Imogen Cunningham. Contributors include Susan Ehrens, Mary Emma Harris, Karin Higa, Jacqueline Hoefer, Emily K. Doman Jennings, Paul J. Karlstrom, John Kreidler, Susan Stauter, Colleen Terry, and Sally B. Woodbridge.

The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air

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

Lisa Yuskavage, 2026. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, Gregory R. Miller & Co. 2020

Text by Christopher Bedford, Helen Molesworth, Heidi Zuckerman. Interview by Mary Weatherford

A new focus on the sublime landscapes in Lisa Yuskavage’s voluptuous figure paintings

Though she is arguably best known for the voluptuous female nudes that populate her paintings, Lisa Yuskavage’s work is just as focused on the ethereal settings in which these subjects appear. Yuskavage creates finely detailed landscapes that blur the line between the fantastical and the familiar, melding abstraction with realism to depict self-contained worlds. These outdoor scenes defy conventions of landscape painting with surreal color palettes of lush greens and delicate pinks, cast in a gauzy light quality that highlights the almost magical nature of her paintings.

Published in conjunction with a joint exhibition between the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, this volume includes color reproductions of Yuskavage’s paintings and watercolors from the early 1990s to the present, as well as an interview between Yuskavage and fellow artist Mary Weatherford.

Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness

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

John Yau

The newest monograph dedicated to the striking new work of internationally acclaimed abstract painter Suzan Frecon.

 features new paintings, which highlight the artist’s ongoing exploration of the interaction of shape, color, texture, and light. Painted over long periods of time, these works are the result of a deliberative process guided by a deep understanding of color and the properties of paint. Frecon has been exploring the issues of horizontality and verticality, asymmetrical balances, and interacting arrangements of color for over five decades. The result is an ongoing dialogue that yields new and surprising paintings at every turn.

Frecon’s knowledge of color is deeply rooted in art history; her selection of color brings with it an understanding of the scientific properties of pigments as well as their use by Renaissance painters. Esteemed poet and critic John Yau explores this inspiration in his illuminating essay, in which he teases out the connections between these bold abstract works and historic figurative paintings. Highlighting Frecon’s interest in these paintings for their form and color rather than their narrative, Yau offers a new and intriguing way of looking at both present and past.

Suzan Frecon

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

In her most personal book to date, Yayoi Kusama brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her paintings, sculptures, and daily life.

With a new focus on Kusama’s use of language, this book features an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other mediums. Highlighting the importance of words to the artist, the book draws special attention to the captivating poetic titles of her paintings, such as in 

I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART

. These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry collected here touches on Kusama’s personal trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art above all else.

, Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this book features more than 300 pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirrored Rooms. It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.

Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray for Love

Cynthia Zarin

From acclaimed poet and New Yorker writer Cynthia Zarin comes a deeply personal meditation on two cities, Venice and Rome—each a work of art, both a monument to the past—and on how love and loss shape places and spaces.

Here we encounter a writer deeply engaged with narrative in situ—a traveler moving through beloved streets, sometimes accompanied, sometimes solo. With her, we see, anew, the Venice Biennale, the Lagoon, and San Michele, the island of the dead; the Piazza di Spagna, the Tiber, the view from the Gianicolo; the pigeons at San Marco and the parrots in the Doria Pamphili. As a poet first and foremost, Zarin’s attention to the smallest details, the loveliest gesture, brings Venice and Rome vividly to life for the reader.

The sixteenth book in the expanding, renowned 

 creates space for these two historic cities to become characters themselves, their relationship to the writer as real as any love affair.

Two Cities

Jarrett Earnest

Ann Reynolds

Kenneth E. Silver

Michael Schreiber

Edited by Jarrett Earnest. Texts by Jarrett Earnest, Ann Reynolds, and Kenneth E. Silver. Interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by Michael Schreiber

Lauded by Jerry Saltz as “one of the most reactionary yet radical visions of art,” 

 tells the story of a group of artists and writers active during the first half of the twentieth century, when homosexuality was as problematic for American culture as figuration was for modernist painting.

These artists—including Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Alexander Jensen Yow, and their circle—were new social creatures, playfully and boldly homosexual at a time when it was both criminalized and pathologized. They pursued a modernism of the body—driven by eroticism and bounded by intimacy, forming a hothouse world within a world that doesn’t nicely fit any subsequent narrative of modern American art. In their work, they looked away from abstraction toward older sources and models—classical and archaic forms of figuration and Renaissance techniques. What might be seen as a reactionary aesthetic maneuver was made in the service of radical content—endeavoring to depict their own lives. Their little-known history is presented here through never- before-exhibited photographs, sculptures, drawings, ephemera, and rarely seen major paintings—offering the first view of its kind into their interwoven intellectual, artistic, and personal lives.

Edited by Jarrett Earnest, who also curated the 2019 exhibition at David Zwirner New York, 

features new scholarship by art historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver and an interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by Michael Schreiber.

1930–1955

The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York

Auguste Rodin

Rachel Corbett

Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler

Text by Auguste Rodin. Introduction by Rachel Corbett. Translated by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler

Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.

In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor’s book 

, first published in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Cathedrals were central to the way Rodin thought about his art: he saw them as visual metaphors for the human figure, among the finest examples of craftsmanship known to modern man, and as a model for how to live and work—slowly, brick by brick.

Here, Corbett takes the fire at Notre Dame and the concerns over its restoration as an entry point in an exploration of Rodin’s cathedrals. Rodin adamantly opposed restoration, as he felt it often did more damage than the original injury. (Many of the cathedrals that Rodin looks at in his texts were, in fact, bombed during the war.) But while he rails against various restoration efforts as evidence that “we are letting our cathedrals die,” the book, with its tenderly rendered sketches and written portraits, is itself an attempt to preserve these cathedrals. The selection of texts in this volume is a reminder—as is the tragedy of Notre Dame—of why we ought to appreciate these feats of architecture, whether or not they are still standing today.

The Cathedral Is Dying

David Levi Strauss

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that “seeing is believing.”

Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smartphones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust.

title on photography, Strauss challenges the aura of believability and highlights the potential dangers around this status. He examines how images produced on cameras gradually gained an inordinate power to influence public opinion, prompt action, comfort and assuage, and direct or even create desire. How and why do we believe technical images the way we do?

Offering a poignant argument in the era of “deepfakes,” Strauss draws attention to new changes in the technology of seeing. Some uses of “technical images” are causing the connection between images and belief (between seeing and believing) to fray and pull apart. How is this shifting our relationship to images? Will this crisis in what we can believe come to threaten our very purchase on the real? This book is an inquiry into the history and future of our belief in images.

Photography and Belief

An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

Helen Molesworth

Lindsay Charlwood

Dagny Corcoran

Daniel DeSure

Thomas Houseago

Deana Lawson

Henry Taylor

Edited with text by Helen Molesworth. Interviews with Lindsay Charlwood, Dagny Corcoran, Daniel DeSure, Thomas Houseago, Deana Lawson, Henry Taylor, and Venus X by Helen Molesworth

Providing a crucial record of the painter Noah Davis’s extraordinary oeuvre, this monograph tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators.

Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Noah Davis created emotionally charged work that places him firmly in the canon of great American painting. Stirring, elusive, and attuned to the history of painting, his compositions infuse scenes from everyday life with a magical realist atmosphere and contain traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, Mark Rothko, and Luc Tuymans.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which travels to the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, a space that Davis founded with his wife, artist Karon Davis. In her introduction, catalogue essay, and interviews with important figures in Davis’s life, curator Helen Molesworth shows how the artist’s generosity and sense of responsibility galvanized a uniquely supportive artistic community, culture, and vision. Through color illustrations and archival photographs, the book captures the intimate yet expansive spirit of a studio visit with the artist.

Noah Davis

Lucas Arruda at the print shop René Tazé, Paris, 2023. Photo by Matthew Avignone

Will Chancellor

Barry Schwabsky

Texts by Will Chancellor and Barry Schwabsky

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda elucidates the artist’s intricate, meditative compositions.

Arruda has gained critical acclaim for atmospheric paintings that fluctuate between abstraction and figuration, imagination and reality. This monograph presents three groups of works loosely characterized as seascapes, jungles, and monochromes. Collectively titled 

, they have an ephemeral, transient quality.

Arruda’s intimately sized paintings of seascapes and junglescapes are characterized by their subtle rendition of light. Painted from memory, they are devoid of specific reference points, instead achieving their variety through the depiction of atmospheric conditions. Verging on abstraction, the compositions are grounded by an ever-present, if sometimes faint, horizon line that offers a perception of distance. They appear at once familiar and imaginary. Through his often evocative and textured brushstrokes, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling his genres’ historical associations with the notion of the romantic sublime.

Alongside meticulous color plates and powerful details, author Will Chancellor offers a close reading of the work, raising questions about artifice, thresholds, and perception. Critic Barry Schwabsky unpacks the challenges posed by Arruda’s mysterious painted surfaces. As a whole, this book provides a detailed introduction to the work of a uniquely thoughtful and inventive artist.

Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo

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

Bob Nickas

The most comprehensive overview of artist Josh Smith’s radical technicolor paintings.

looks at the artist’s vigorous repetition of particular motifs, illuminating his approach to painting as an exploratory medium for image production. Published on the occasion of Smith’s critically acclaimed first exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue features a new body of work that marks an important evolution for the artist. In these paintings, Smith sets the stage for a new mode of self-reflective commentary on image making, acknowledging that “the meaning perhaps arises in the making.”

A new essay by Bob Nickas treats the Reaper, Turtle, and Devil figures from 

as ciphers through which to understand Smith’s work. Nickas demonstrates how these new paintings restage and personalize the artist’s more abstract earlier works and illuminates the ways in which repetition functions within Smith’s practice. With more than one hundred illustrations, this book serves as the ideal introduction to Smith’s disruptive oeuvre.

a Celebration

Josh Smith: Emo Jungle

Suzanne Hudson

Robert Slifkin

Texts by Suzanne Hudson and Robert Slifkin

 focuses on American abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Mitchell’s exploration of the possibilities afforded by combining two to five large canvases allowed her to simultaneously create continuity and rupture, while opening up a panoramic expanse referencing landscapes or the memory of landscapes.

Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure- ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Art critic John Yau lauded her paintings as “one of the towering achievements of the postwar period.”

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2019, this book offers a unique opportunity to explore the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative area of Mitchell’s extensive body of work. It not only features reproductions of each painting in this selection as a whole, but also numerous details that allow an intimate understanding of the surface texture and brushwork. In the complementing essays, Suzanne Hudson examines boundaries, borders, and edges in Mitchell’s multipanel paintings, beginning with her first work of this kind, 

 (1956), considering them as both physical and conceptual objects; Robert Slifkin discusses the dynamics of repetition and energy in the artist’s paintings, in relation to works by Monet and Willem de Kooning, among others.

Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me

Germano Celant

Over five decades, Doug Wheeler has pioneered the art of light and space. His work powerfully explores the way we perceive “empty” space—the way light can affect our perception and make emptiness feel full and dense. From his early experiences flying across the desert with his father, a doctor in Globe, Arizona, Wheeler developed a passion for the intensity and stillness of vast expanses, seeing in them a whole new set of possibilities for visual art.

Although Wheeler began his career as a painter, his wall-mounted artworks soon began incorporating light as a medium and quickly gave way to an unprecedented art-historical breakthrough: his construction of an absolute light environment, crafted in his studio in 1967. Since that unparalleled moment, Wheeler’s work has been exhibited widely all over the world; in the past decade, with numerous major gallery and museum installations, his reputation as the definitive light and space artist has been solidified.

This volume, featuring new scholarship by renowned art historian Germano Celant, traces the entire course of Wheeler’s career to date, from his first mature paintings to his immersive installations. Writing on Wheeler’s intense and direct engagement with the absoluteness in the optical fields he creates, Celant provides a detailed account for Wheeler’s development as one of the most original and influential artists of his generation. Wheeler’s work not only changes how we encounter reality after we see it, but also how we envision what is possible more broadly in visual art.

Doug Wheeler

Brenda Danilowitz

T’ai Smith

Texts by Brenda Danilowitz and T’ai Smith

The first in-depth study of a monumental wall hanging—rediscovered after many years—by renowned Bauhaus artist Anni Albers, who was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art.

Albers was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art. Her exquisite wall hanging 

—seen for the first time outside of Mexico City at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, and the subject of this book—is a superb example of this modern master’s work.

In 1967, noted architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned Albers to create a work for the newly built Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. Completed in 1968, her striking wall hanging 

is heavily influenced by Latin American art and culture. Showcasing Albers’s approach to working with textiles as a “many-sided practice,” it is accompanied in this book by works Albers made following her move to the United States in 1933, including innovative wall hangings, weavings, and a range of works on paper. Together, these works reflect Albers’s brilliant embrace of different materials and techniques and her ability to work at varied scales. The works in this publication offer additional context and motifs, demonstrating the artist’s pioneering investment in textiles as an art form and her parallel interest in mass-produced designs.

Published on the occasion of the Anni Albers exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this catalogue features new scholarship from the show’s curator, Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and T’ai Smith, an expert on Bauhaus craft and weaving.

Anni Albers: Camino Real

Guy Davenport

Judith Thurman

By Guy Davenport. Contribution by Judith Thurman. Afterword by Lucas Zwirner

In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.

Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer.

Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

A Balthus Notebook

Jeff Koons

The first book to explore two of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art side by side, Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons

In the first half of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp redefined what we consider art and what it means to be an artist. Many of his ideas return, transformed, in the work of Jeff Koons, born when Duchamp was 68 years old and whose own career lit up the art world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This is the first book to explore the affinities between these two highly influential artists, whose creative universes similarly question the function of objects and the allure of commodities. International art historians, writers, and curators contribute their expertise on topics such as each artist's persona, as well as reflecting on the influence of technology and sexuality on their work.

The publication of this intriguing book coincides with an exhibition at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, opening in May 2019.

Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even

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