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

Eva Meyer-Hermann

The third volume of a catalogue raisonné of Luc Tuymans’s paintings, surveying nearly two hundred works, charts the artist’s investigation into painting’s relationship to history and technology.

Tuymans is widely credited with having contributed to the revival of painting in the 1990s. His sparsely colored, figurative works speak in a quiet, restrained, and at times unsettling voice and are typically painted from preexisting imagery that includes photographs and video stills. The works in this volume, made between 2007 to 2018, show Tuymans at his most virtuosic, subtly but provocatively addressing a range of topics including religion, corporatization, and cultural memory, in addition to modernism and the history of painting. The Internet, in particular, is central to these works as well as the screen—leading to a new style of contemporary image. The works are mediatized to the nth degree, despite the artist’s continuous use of the traditional medium of painting. There is a certain kind of light that comes out of a screen, which can be found in Tuymans’s recent paintings.

This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 3 2007–2018, David Zwirner Books, 2019

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 3, 2007–2018

2007–2018

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 3

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

A career retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, Japan’s most prominent artist and “Queen of Polka Dots,” covering all aspects of her provocative work.

Avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama’s matchless creativity and originality have been captivating the world for more than six decades. Her retrospective exhibitions in four major European and American museums have seen record attendance.

, originally published to accompany a sellout exhibition at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art, offers an overview of Kusama’s entire career, including works from her youth, when she indulged in drawing in order to escape from her hallucinations; paintings made when she was based in New York, including “Infinity Nets” and “Polka Dots,” and her happenings in places such as Central Park; her immersive mirrored infinity rooms from the 1980s and 1990s, when she participated in the Venice Biennale; and last but not least, the ongoing large-scale series “My Eternal Soul.” Kusama has continuously innovated and reinvented her style; well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation.

Featuring an essay by Akira Shibutami analyzing Kusama’s work, this comprehensive publication celebrates one of Japan’s most important artists.

Yayoi Kusama: All About My Love

H.D.

Michael Green

ekphrasis

H.D.’s writing continues to inspire generations of readers. Bringing together a number of never-before-published essays, this new collection of H.D.’s writings introduces her compelling perspectives on art, myth, and the creative process.

While she is best known for her elemental poetry, which draws heavily on the imagery of natural and ancient worlds, H.D.’s critical writings remain a largely underexplored and unpublished part of her oeuvre. Crucial to understanding both the formative contexts surrounding her departure from Imagism following World War I and her own remarkable creative vision, 

, written in 1918, is one of the central works in this collection. H.D. guides her reader to the untamed shores of the Isles of Scilly, where we hear of powerful, transformative experiences and of her intense relationship with the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The accompanying essays, many published here for the first time, help color H.D.’s astute critical engagement with the past, from the city of Athens and the poetry of ancient Greece. Like Rainer Maria Rilke’s 

 series, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process.

Visions and Ecstasies: Selected Essays

Okwui Enwezor

Spotlight Series

Interview with the artist by Okwui Enwezor

Over the course of his three-decade career, Thomas Ruff has taken up many approaches to photography in his investigation into the status of the image in contemporary culture.

, the artist presents new work that continues his ongoing probe into the history, processes, techniques, and technology of photography. One of the most influential artists working with photography today, Ruff has redefined the medium’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and challenging the essence of the medium as a means for visual experience. He has investigated various photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, and landscape and architectural photography, using both analog and digital technologies, and culling imagery from scientific archives, print media, and the internet.

Presented here is a selection of Ruff’s most well-known works, as well as the newer 

 series, begun in 2018, which draws on negatives of India and Burma taken in the 1850s by Captain Linnaeus Tripe, an officer in the East India Company. Also included is a conversation between Ruff and Okwui Enwezor, which took place at Haus der Kunst in Munich, in connection with the artist’s retrospective then on view. The conversation, published here for the first time, has been edited for this volume and examines Ruff’s artistic practice and inspiration, serving as an engaging and dynamic introduction to the artist.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, 

Thomas Ruff: Transforming Photography

Oscar Wilde

Michael Bracewell

By Oscar Wilde. Introduction by Michael Bracewell

, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism.

, the essay takes the form of a leisurely dialogue between two characters: Ernest, who insists upon Wilde’s own belief in art’s freedom from societal mandates and values, and a quizzical Gilbert. With his playwright’s ear for dialogue, Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. Beyond the well-known dictum of art for art’s sake, Wilde’s originality lays argument for the equality of criticism and art. For him, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without engaging his or her critical faculties first. And, as Wilde writes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own.”

The field of art and criticism should be open to the free play of the mind, but Wilde plays seriously, even prophetically. Writing in 1891, he foresaw that criticism would have an increasingly important role as the need to make sense of what we see increases with the complexities of modern life. It is only the fine perception and explication of beauty, Wilde suggests, that will allow us to create meaning, joy, empathy, and peace out of the chaos of facts and reality.

The Critic as Artist

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

New work by American artist Sherrie Levine engages her ongoing practice of appropriating artworks from the Western art historical canon—this time by taking Ad Reinhardt’s 

 (2018) continues the artist’s ongoing investigation of color separated from its representational function. Inspired by the exhibition 

 held at David Zwirner, New York in 2017, Levine has created abstract restatements of the 28 works that were on view, making use of pixilation to consolidate the range of blue tones in each painting into a single, truly monochromatic value. This work revisits a technique first employed by Levine in her 1989 group of woodcut prints 

, where an averaging algorithm was used to create a checkerboard composition based on modernist artists’ iconic paintings.

 is published on the occasion of Levine’s eponymous solo exhibition at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location in New York in 2019. The publication features full color reproductions of 

 and includes the 1965 text “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” in which Reinhardt famously interviewed himself.

Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt

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 Tamara H. Schenkenberg. Texts by Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg

“Doing is living. That is all that matters.”—Ruth Asawa

Throughout her long and prolific career American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) developed innovative sculptures in wire, a medium she explored through increasingly complex forms using craft-based techniques she learned while traveling in Mexico in 1947. In 1949, after studying at Black Mountain College, Asawa moved to San Francisco and created dozens of wire works, among them an iconic bronze fountain—the first of many public commissions—for the city’s Ghirardelli Square.

Bringing together examples from across Asawa’s full and extraordinary career, this expansive volume serves as an unprecedented reorientation of her sculptures within the historical context of 20th-century art. In particular, it includes careful consideration of Asawa’s advocacy for arts education in public schools, while simultaneously focusing on her vital—and long under-recognized—contributions to the field of sculpture. Insightful essays explore the intersection of formal experimentation and identity to offer a fresh assessment of this celebrated artist. Richly illustrated with exquisite new installation views, 

 introduces original scholarship that traces the dynamic evolution of form in the artist’s work.

Ruth Asawa: Life's Work

Sherry Turner DeCarava

Radiclani Clytus

Texts by Radiclani Clytus and Sherry Turner DeCarava

 is the pictorial equivalent of jazz. Here, the visionary photographer turns his gaze on legendary jazz icons Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday, among many others.

“This is a book about people, about jazz, and about things. The work between its covers tries to present images for the head and for the heart and, like its subject matter, is particular, subjective, and individual,” writes DeCarava. A master of poetic contemplation and of sensual tonalities in black and white, DeCarava is, above all, a photographer of people. A member of the post–World War II generation that sought a new modernist vocabulary, he was first recognized for his innovative images of life in Harlem (the subject of 

, his 1955 collaboration with poet Langston Hughes) and extraordinary portraits of jazz musicians. It is these two themes—New York and jazz—interwoven and inseparable, that are the ostensible subject of 

. However, the seemingly casual yet deeply felt compositions and the rich, gradient tones of DeCarava’s photographs stir emotions that resonate far beyond one neighborhood and one era.

Conceived, designed, written, and made as an artist maquette by DeCarava in the early 1960s, 

 went unpublished for almost half a century until it was printed by Phaidon in 2001. At its core is a visual and philosophical journey to plumb the meaning of a creative life. The artist’s intention in proposing a complex relationship between vision and music moves his comprehensive, decade-long reflection to the status of a magnum opus. This new edition, copublished by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books, includes new scholarship by Radiclani Clytus and reflections by Sherry Turner DeCarava.

Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw

Zoé Whitley

Preface by Zoé Whitley. Introduction and text by Sherry Turner DeCarava

 presents the first survey since 1996 of photographer Roy DeCarava, an essential figure of American art and culture, whose “poetry of vision” re-forms urban life, labor, love, and jazz into the discovery of “an intimate, emotional arc of transformation.”

Though DeCarava often refrained from public discussion of his work, this catalogue provides important background into determining factors of his aesthetic sensibility—his traditional training in painting and printmaking as well as his philosophical undertakings. It brings the viewer to a consideration of contradictory precepts in DeCarava’s work that seeks resolution through tonal and structural elements within the image.

 presents a wide-ranging selection of DeCarava’s photographs accompanied by a preface by Zoé Whitley, an American curator based in London, and features an introduction and essay by curator and art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava. Titled “Celebration,” Turner DeCarava’s essay considers the artist’s singular poetic vision, his timeless portrayals of individuals and places, and his mastery of composition and photographic printmaking.

As Whitley writes, “In making photographs, as in life, DeCarava was patient. Possessing both a peerless self-awareness and acute observational skills, he knew intuitively when to wait and when to open the camera’s shutter. In the dark room, he availed himself of these same attributes, moving with steady assurance to develop his prints so as to allow the full range of what he called his ‘infinite scale of grey tones’—often realized at the deepest end of the spectrum—to emerge slowly and fully.”

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of DeCarava’s work at David Zwirner, New York in 2019, this exquisite volume showcases a dynamic range of images that underscore DeCarava’s subtle mastery of tonal and spatial elements across a wide, fascinating array of subject matter: from the figural implications of smoke and debris to the “shimmering mirror beneath a mother as she walks with her children in the morning light.” These photographs express a strength of imagery—an intent to synchronize and honor the pulse of art as an emergent signal for creative and revelatory freedom.

Roy DeCarava: Light Break

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

Daniel Kehlmann

One of the most influential figurative painters of his generation, Neo Rauch presents bold, new work in 

Rauch is widely celebrated for his captivating compositions that bring together figurative painting and surrealism into an entirely new kind of visual encounter. They often hint at broader narratives and histories—seemingly reconnecting with artistic traditions of realism—but they remain dreamlike and impossible to reduce to a single story. Though his art is highly refined and executed with great technical skill, Rauch himself stresses the intuitive, deeply personal nature of how he works. As the artist notes, “My process is far less a reflection than it is drawing from the sediments of my past, which occurs in an almost trance-like state.”

Eight large-scale canvases and seven smaller, more intimately scaled works continue the artist’s exploration of figuration and the ambiguous nature of meaning in visual art. In some of the larger works, the saturation of the canvas with characters, objects, and forms, all rendered at different scales and in conflicting arrangements, creates a collage-like quality—a figurative scrapbook of Rauch’s personal iconography.

The publication features a short story by German novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann, which was inspired by the paintings in this book. The fantastical text moves between present-day New York and an unknown time of enchanted forests, knights, and witches, exploring the many layers found in Rauch’s canvases. Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong in 2019, 

Neo Rauch: PROPAGANDA

Laila Pedro

Lying deep within the urban metropolis of Hong Kong, Happy Valley is one of the most iconic racecourses in the world. It is also the chief source of inspiration for a new body of work by American artist Marcel Dzama.

Jockeys ride through waves and cathedrals, Chinese symbols pulled from racing paraphernalia adorn the edges of paper, and bats swoop, hunting for prey. Dzama’s distinct visions of the racetrack come alive through a series of large-scale paintings and drawings, transposing imagery from his prolific oeuvre into this adrenaline-filled sporting arena. His new works reflect on the culture of horseracing and how the track has become not only a symbol of sport, but also of commerce, class, and wealth.

The publication includes a conversation between Dzama and Laila Pedro. Published on the occasion of his solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong in 2019, 

Marcel Dzama: Crossing the Line

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

Jarrett Earnest

Hanna Schouwink

Text by Jarrett Earnest. Foreword by Hanna Schouwink

 is the first survey of the artist’s small-scale paintings. While Yuskavage is primarily known for larger canvases, these intimate works offer a new window into her transgressive paintings and complex and influential oeuvre.

Based on the artist’s imagination, live models, maquettes, and found and staged photographs, the small paintings in this book demonstrate Yuskavage’s methodical exploration of how images are created and their sources. Some of the small works are studies for large paintings, while others revisit preexisting images. Yet others are one-of-a-kind compositions only created on this intimate scale. As places for experimenting with color, form, and characters as well as a variety of formats—including stretched and unstretched linen, canvas boards, wood, and paper—these paintings play a remarkably dynamic and pivotal role within her work. This catalogue presents the paintings to scale so readers can explore the works as if seeing them in person.

Documenting the artist’s exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018, this catalogue includes an essay by Jarrett Earnest that illuminates Yuskavage’s early influences and explores the constant, often surprising themes that can be found throughout her art.

Small Paintings, 1985–2018

Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood

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

Teju Cole

Hal Foster

Kerry James Marshall is one of America’s greatest living painters. 

 presents a groundbreaking body of new work that engages with the history of the medium itself.

, the artist has widened his scope to include both figurative and nonfigurative works that deal explicitly with art history, race, and gender, as well as force us to reexamine how artworks are received in the world and in the art market. In the paintings in this book, Marshall’s critique of history and of dominant white narratives is present, even as the subjects of the paintings move between reproductions of auction catalogues, abstract works, and scenes of everyday life.

Essays by Teju Cole and Hal Foster help readers navigate the artist’s masterful vision, decoding complexly layered works such as 

 (2018) and Marshall’s own artistic philosophy. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Marshall’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, London, in 2018.

Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting

Paul Klee and Hans Bloesch met while they were still in school and remained friends all their lives. They also took their first steps as artists together: Bloesch as a writer, Klee as a painter. From 1902 to 1905 they collaborated on an open project, which they simply called "Das Buch" (The Book). Bloesch contributed poems, Klee watercolors and drawings. However, they finally lost interest in it and "Das Buch" was abandoned.

Today it represents an extraordinary discovery because it contains many previously unknown works by Paul Klee and for the first time provides a broad insight into his early artistic development. This volume contains a facsimile of "Das Buch" including transcripts, commentaries, and two essays on this astonishing discovery.

A Joint Project from the Years 1902 to 1905

Hans Bloesch and Paul Klee: Das Buch

 presents sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling 

This collection of interviews engages a diverse range of topics, from philosophy and politics to Judd’s insightful critiques of his own work and the work of others such as Mark di Suvero, Edward Hopper, Yayoi Kusama, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. The opening discussion of the volume between Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella provides the foundation for many of the succeeding conversations, focusing on the nature and material conditions of the new art developing in the 1960s. The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums, such as radio and film, including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose.

Judd’s contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, whether in dialogue with art critics, art historians, or his contemporaries. In one of the last interviews with Christopher Felver, Judd observed, “Generally, expensive art is in expensive, chic circumstances; it’s a falsification. The society is basically not interested in art. And most people who are artists do that because they like the work; they like to do that [make art]. Art has an integrity of its own and a purpose of its own, and it’s not to serve the society. That’s been tried now in the Soviet Union and lots of places, and it doesn’t work. The only role I can think of, in a very general way, for the artist is that it [art] tends to shake up the society a little bit just by its existence, in which case it helps undermine the general political stagnation and, perhaps by providing a little freedom, supports science, which requires freedom. If the artist isn’t free, you won’t have any art."

 is copublished by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. The interviews expand upon the artist’s thinking present in 

 (Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).

Donald Judd Interviews

Installation view of Carol Bove at the Met, New York, 2022.

Johanna Burton

Interview with the artist by Johanna Burton

 presents new work by “sculpture’s woman of steel,” as coined by Randy Kennedy in 

. Her new sculptures expand on her investigations of materiality and form.

Characterized by compositions of various types of steel, Bove’s ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” begun in 2016, amalgamates theoretical and art-historical influences across time periods and disciplines. To create these lyrical and abstract assemblages, Bove pairs fabricated tubing that has been crushed and shaped at her studio with found metal scraps and a single highly polished disk. Luminous color is applied to parts of the composition, transforming the steel—more commonly associated with inflexibility and heft—into something that appears malleable and lightweight, like clay, fabric, or crinkled paper.

Bove’s new works are smaller in scale and elaborate on the “collage sculptures,” with more complex forms that twist, fold, and bend into postures that belie their material construction. She manipulates steel to varying degrees, rendering gentle folds in some, and extreme, almost anthropomorphic contortions in others. Their contrasting textures—matte, glossy, or rough—create a further sense of visual play, heightening the surface tension throughout.

This publication features a new interview with the artist by Johanna Burton. Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, 

Carol Bove: Ten Hours

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Helen Molesworth

Ginny Neel

Text by Helen Molesworth. Introduction by Ginny Neel. Contribution by Marlene Dumas

One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people.

Known for her daringly honest portraits, Neel loved to paint people in all their complexities—to penetrate and reveal their fears and anxieties. She also loved to paint the unadorned human figure. Her nudes, in particular, explore the body with frankness while celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects, and they exemplify the freedom and courage with which she approached her work and her life.

Through her paintings and works on paper, Neel was able to free herself from the expected inhibitions and crippling taboos that were placed on women and focus on the beauty and nuanced complexity of flesh and the human body. In their mastery of form, color, and implied social commentary, her nudes are as relevant today as when they were painted.

 documents the solo exhibition of the artist’s work at David Zwirner in New York in 2019. Including works that span the 1920s to the 1980s, this presentation focuses primarily on the nude figure—whether male or female, adult or child—and demonstrates how Neel rebelled against and challenged the traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty in our society. The catalogue includes newly commissioned scholarship by Helen Molesworth and an introduction by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel.

Learn more about the artist 

Alice Neel: Freedom

Patrick Modiano

Dominique Zehrfuss

Damion Searls

Poems by Patrick Modiano. Illustrated by Dominique Zehrfuss. Translated with an introduction by Damion Searls

Published in English for the first time, 

 is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss.

 is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 

 captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano.

Zehrfuss’s paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover—perhaps they are not so different—relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing—poetry inspired by paintings—this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience.

First published by Editions de l’Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

28 Paradises

Yun Hyong-keun (1928–2007) was one of the most prominent abstract monochromists. Internationally admired during his life (Donald Judd was an advocate and friend), he belongs to a generation of artists whose influence has been crucial since the end of the Korean War. Both the war itself and its aftermath deeply affected the artist. In the 1970s Yun Hyong-keun joined the Dansaekhwa movement, a leading group of Korean artists whose monochromatic paintings intensively explored the effects and nature of color.

This handsomely produced volume, accompanying a major exhibition at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, offers a cornucopia of artistic and personal materials from the artist’s estate, which together provide great insight into the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most important abstractionists.

Yun Hyong-keun (Palazzo Fortuny)

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Fred Moten

Seeing Shakespeare

By William Shakespeare. Illustrated by Chris Ofili. Introduction by Fred Moten

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

In the twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in 

 the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him.

Dialogues:
The David Zwirner Podcast
Chris Ofili and Emily Wilson

 in front of an audience at the 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, and lies.

William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello

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

Claire Messud

Marlene Dumas’s works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery.

 documents a selection of paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture.

Alongside these paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem 

 is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

Over the course of four decades, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has created his own distinctive vernacular, a new visual vocabulary. The second volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly two hundred works, including some of his most iconic canvases.

Between the years 1995 and 2006, Tuymans’s work trended toward ideas of national and collective memory. In 1996, the artist created a group of ten paintings entitled 

, for which he transformed familiar images of American life, such as Mount Rushmore, baseball caps, and the United States flag, into unsettling visions, addressing the country’s perceived vulnerability, both physical and psychological, following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Paintings from 

, his seminal body of work that was first shown at David Zwirner, New York, in 2000, after which he expanded the series for his presentation for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, depict imagery derived from the fraught history of Belgian colonial rule of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also included is one of Tuymans’s best-known paintings, 

 (2005), a powerful yet seemingly vulnerable portrayal of Condoleezza Rice, which conjures the long history of racial and sexual prejudice in the United States, not as something that has been overcome, but as an active force shaping our reality.

This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1995–2006

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 2

An installation view of an exhibition titled Andra Ursuta: Void Fill at David Zwirner, Paris, in 2021.

Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Ali Subotnick.

Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

Andra Ursuta: 2000 Words

This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works from the vital early years of his career

Credited with a key role in the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) continues to produce subtle, and at times unsettling, works that engage with history, technology, and everyday life. This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works that were vital to his artistic development. The years 1972 to 1994 witnessed the maturation of his signature method of painting from preexisting imagery—such as magazine images, Polaroids, and television footage—as well as his first solo exhibition. Also dating from this period are many of his seminal canvases, along with ten poignant portraits of the ailing human body and the enigmatic series Superstition that comprised his first works exhibited in the United States.

The catalogue features brilliant new photography of each of the paintings and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation shots of the works in this volume. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1972–1994

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 1

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