Miami NY | David Zwirner

Live from New York, it’s Art Basel Miami Beach.

David Zwirner’s first livestreamed presentation, Miami NY debuts a new hybrid experience with the immediacy of a physical fair.

Inquire about works from Miami NY

Join us for a series of public walkthroughs and Q&As on Wednesday, December 2, 2020:

12 PM EST: Senior partners Kristine Bell and Bellatrix Hubert
2 PM EST: Partners Branwen Jones and David Leiber
3 PM EST: Directors Kyla McMillan and Thor Shannon

Ad Reinhardt

Untitled, 1949-1950

Casein and gouache on paper

22 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches (57.2 x 69.9 cm)
Framed: 33 1/8 x 38 inches (84.1 x 96.5 cm)

One of the most celebrated American painters of the twentieth century, Ad Reinhardt engaged with the history of abstract painting and emergent minimalist and conceptual art practices in a way that continues to resonate today.

The present work belongs to a body of gouaches on paper from the late 1940s, a period in Reinhardt’s output when his investment in color, expressionistic brushstrokes, calligraphic elements, and collage-like layering were closely aligned.

Ad Reinhardt, Untitled, 1949-1950 (detail)

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (S.786, Hanging Two-Sectioned, Open-Window Form), c. 1954-1958

Hanging sculpture—steel wire

52 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (133.3 x 49.5 x 49.5 cm)

Ruth Asawa is widely beloved for the extensive body of wire sculptures she created for more than a half century and which continue to challenge conventional notions of sculpture to this day. Their unique structure, made up of wire loops, was inspired by Asawa’s 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local artisans taught her how to create baskets out of wire.

Asawa executed her looped-wire forms in various configurations, including the present sculpture’s single-line, open-window form, which she first developed in the early 1950s. This work was originally owned by the artist and poet Peggy Tolk-Watkins, a fellow student at Black Mountain College who co-owned the jazz club The Tin Angel that hosted Asawa’s first solo exhibition in 1953.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.786, Hanging Two-Sectioned, Open-Window Form), c. 1954–1958 (detail)

“Asawa’s hanging looped-wire sculptures were a triumph of line and form, playing with weight, gravity, visibility, the continuity of multiple spheres and cones, and the ambiguity of inside and outside space.”

—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Artforum

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.786, Hanging Two-Sectioned, Open-Window Form), c. 1954–1958 (detail)

Joan Mitchell

Untitled, c. 1956

Oil on canvas

16 x 13 inches (40.6 x 33 cm)
Framed: 17 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches (45.1 x 37.5 cm)

Over the course of a more than four-decade career, Joan Mitchell established a singular vocabulary that, while rooted in the conventions of abstraction, embodied a distinctive style and approach that was uniquely her own. This painting is exemplary of the artist’s work from a period in the late 1950s during which she split her time between Paris and New York.

The work synthesizes the influences of her New York contemporaries (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock) and, with its distinct palette of deep blues, ochres, and greens, references the European tradition of landscape painting.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, c. 1956 (detail)

Evident in this early painting is what Linda Nochlin calls “a very specific battle between containment and chaos … [indicative of a] poignant visual searching.”

Installation view, Miami NY, David Zwirner, New York, 2020. Featuring works, from left, by Josef Albers, Joan Mitchell, and Ruth Asawa

Donald Judd

Untitled, 1985

Aluminum

5 x 40 x 8 1/2 inches (12.7 x 101.6 x 21.6 cm)

One of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, Donald Judd created a rigorous visual vocabulary that sought clear and definite objects as its primary mode of articulation. This work is an example of Judd’s wall-mounted round-front progression—a horizontal work that protrudes from the wall and is characterized by its rounded, notched segments.

Judd returned to this form in various iterations throughout his career. Executed in aluminum, this work explores the primary preoccupations of the artist’s body of work, such as materiality and the relationship between surface and volume.

Installation views, Donald Judd Artworks: 1970-1994, David Zwirner, New York, 2020

Judd’s work is currently the subject of a survey exhibition at David Zwirner and a full-scale retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. As MoMA curator Ann Temkin writes, “a full understanding of Judd’s contribution to the history of modern art continues to unfold. If Judd did not choose predecessors in sculpture to guide him in what he wanted to do, he has proven in various ways just such a predecessor to any number of artists, regardless of apparent relation between his work and theirs.”

Explore the exhibition Donald Judd Artworks: 1970–1994 at David Zwirner, curated by Flavin Judd.

Donald Judd, untitled, 1985 (detail)

Installation view, Miami NY, David Zwirner, New York, 2020. Featuring works, from left, by Yayoi Kusama, Dan Flavin, and John McCracken

Dan Flavin

“monument” for V. Tatlin, 1964

cool white fluorescent light

8 ft. (244 cm) high

Dan Flavin produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially available fluorescent lamps to create light and color installations that enabled him to literally establish and redefine space. This work is from the artist’s seminal series of “monuments” to V. Tatlin, which is dedicated to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin.

Like other artists in the 1960s, Flavin appreciated the Russian Constructivists for their quest to express revolutionary social and political attitudes in a language of pure abstraction, which, particularly in Tatlin’s case, emphasized the use of real materials (tin, wood, iron, glass, plaster) in three-dimensional space. Another edition of this work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Installation view, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2007

Installation view, “monuments” for V. Tatlin from Dan Flavin, 1964–1983, MoCA Temporary Contemporary, Los Angeles, 1984

“My concern for the thought of Russian artist-designer Vladimir Tatlin was prompted by the man’s frustrated, insistent attitude to attempt to combine artistry and engineering. The pseudo-monuments, structural designs for clear but temporary cool white fluorescent lighting, were to honor the artist ironically.”

—Dan Flavin

Bridget Riley

Intervals 4, 2019

Oil on linen

89 3/4 x 65 inches (228 x 165.2 cm)

Bridget Riley’s work focuses exclusively on seemingly simple geometric forms, such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, arrayed across a surface according to an internal logic. The resulting compositions actively engage the viewer, at times triggering sensations of vibration and movement. Riley’s Intervals series from 2019 revisits one of her most enduring motifs—stripes—which she first utilized in 1961.

In this body of work, the contrast of horizontal stripes with the canvas’s vertical format suggests a countervailing push and pull between opposing directional forces. In these works, Riley’s treatment of the figure-ground dichotomy represents a thematic continuation of her ongoing works that reward sustained engagement by viewers.

Bridget Riley, Intervals 4, 2019 (detail)

Yayoi Kusama

Flowers That Bloom at Midnight, 2009

Fiberglass reinforced plastic, metal, and urethane paint

53 1/2 x 86 5/8 x 89 3/4 inches (136 x 220 x 228 cm)

Flowers That Bloom at Midnight relates to Yayoi Kusama’s epic sculptural installations of bright, fantastically scaled plants. The series comprises individual flowers, each uniquely colored and featuring the artist’s distinctive bold palette.

The cheerful, psychedelic flowers, but with monstrous, exaggerated features, convey a duality that is present throughout the artist’s work. They communicate life and death, celebration and mourning, and figuration and abstraction, with each opposite simultaneously pushed to its limits.

Yayoi Kusama, Flowers That Bloom at Midnight, 2009 (detail)

“This was my epic, summing up all I was. And the spell of the dots and the mesh enfolded me in a magical curtain of mysterious, invisible power.”

—Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama

INFINITY-NETS [FRBQJ], 2014

Acrylic on canvas

57 3/8 x 57 3/8 inches (145.5 x 145.5 cm)

Yayoi Kusama began her Infinity Net paintings in the 1950s, when she moved to the United States from her native Japan and when abstract expressionism was still the dominant style. She has continuously returned to the theme in her paintings, using a variety of formats and colors, and incorporated the same obsessive, hallucinatory qualities in her three-dimensional work.

The present work creates an optical combination of two colors—a white net pattern over a black background—that appears flat and uniformly repetitive from afar but up close reveals the materiality of the paint and unique nature of the repeating elements.

Yayoi Kusama, INFINITY-NETS [FRBQJ], 2014 (detail)

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Someday I'll Tell You About This, 2019

Acrylic and oil on panel

24 x 20 inches (61 x 50.8 cm)

Njideka Akunyili Crosby creates intricately layered figurative compositions that combine painted depictions of people and places from her life with photographic transfers derived from her own personal image archive, as well as from Nigerian magazines and other mass-media sources.

This work is part of a group of paintings the artist created for her presentation at the 2019 Venice Biennale that explore the legibility of the body as a surface, in which hair, skin, clothing, jewelry, and self-presentation resonate culturally and historically.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, installation view, 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, May You Live in Interesting Times, Arsenale, Venice, 2019

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Someday I'll Tell You About This, 2019 (detail)

Noah Davis

Winter Formal, 2008

Oil and acrylic on canvas

40 1/4 x 30 1/8 inches (102.2 x 76.5 cm)

Noah Davis is renowned for a body of work that includes lush, sensual figurative paintings as well as an ambitious institutional project, the Underground Museum. His emotionally charged compositions place him firmly in the canon of great American painting, often depicting scenes from everyday life and infused with magical realism, and with traces of Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, and Luc Tuymans.

As Davis has said of his surreal images, “These elements of fantasy may arise from my need to ‘break the spell,’ or the constraints of art theory, and move more into the realm of mysticism.”

Noah Davis, Winter Formal, 2008 (detail)

“Despite his untimely death at the age of thirty-two, Davis’s paintings are a crucial part of the rise of figurative and representational painting in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.”

—Helen Molesworth, curator

Suzan Frecon

tessera, 2020

Oil on linen

29 7/8 x 24 1/8 inches (75.9 x 61.3 cm)

Made over long stretches of time, Suzan Frecon’s paintings invite the viewer’s sustained attention: these, she says, “are not pictures that you look at. They are paintings that you experience.” In Frecon’s paintings, composition serves as a foundational structure, holding color, material, and light.

Colors and surfaces vary in density and reflectivity, and areas in the composition shift between dark and light. Figure can become ground and ground can become figure, or as the artist prefers to define it, full and empty space.

Suzan Frecon, tessera, 2020 (detail)

Oscar Murillo

(untitled) surge, 2019-2020

Oil and oil stick on canvas and linen

67 1/4 x 98 3/4 inches (170.8 x 250.8 cm)

Oscar Murillo’s inventive and itinerant practice emphasizes the notion of cultural exchange and the ways in which ideas, languages, and everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled. For his surge paintings, the artist uses found and invented imagery, phrases, and gestural markings to create visually layered surfaces that he covers in dense bursts of color, including vivid blue and, in the present work, a significant rush of fiery red.

Referencing the surge of energy used to make the works, as well as the ability of water to flow indiscriminately without regard to arbitrary constructs such as maps or borders, Murillo conjures a utopic and cautionary vision of contemporary geopolitics while subtly gesturing to art-historical precedents.

Oscar Murillo, (untitled) surge, 2019-2020 (detail)

“What I am experimenting with in this surge painting is using iconographies and gesture to continue an engagement with the current moment—an engagement that runs in parallel with the reality of the world today.”

—Oscar Murillo

Lisa Yuskavage

Photoshoot, 2020

Oil on canvas

Overall: 62 x 58 1/2 inches (157.5 x 148.6 cm)
Each: 62 x 28 inches (157.5 x 71.1 cm)

For more than three decades, Lisa Yuskavage has challenged conventional understandings of figurative painting through her highly original approach to the genre. Her bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters are cast within fantastical compositions in which realistic and abstract elements coexist and color determines meaning.

While evoking art-historical precedents in their formal painterly techniques, the artist’s works are often in dialogue with popular culture. They resist categorization and insist instead on their own emotional formalism in which characters and pictorial inventions assume equal importance.

Lisa Yuskavage, Photoshoot, 2020 (detail)

“She made pictures about women looking at themselves, of women looking at other women. And all these images had the DNA of six centuries’ worth of paintings made by men for men of means that were about looking at women.”

—Helen Molesworth

Installation view, Miami NY, David Zwirner, New York, 2020. Featuring works, from left, by Lisa Yuskavage, Dana Schutz, and Carol Bove

Dana Schutz

Floating Pieta, 2020

Gouache and graphite on paper

44 1/8 x 30 3/8 inches (112.1 x 77.2 cm)
Framed: 47 1/4 x 33 3/8 inches (120 x 84.8 cm)

Dana Schutz is known for formally inventive canvases that combine figuration and abstraction to construct complex visual narratives. Her work often depicts figures in seemingly impossible, enigmatic, or invented situations, conveying emotions and psychological states that reveal the complications, tensions, and ambiguities of contemporary life.

Floating Pieta relates to an oil-on-canvas painting with the same title that likewise depicts a wounded figure being held by a cloud-like figure as they float in the air, away from the scene on the ground below. In the present gouache, rocks, a lone figure, a cross-like form, and a snail on the ground cast shadows like sundials.

Dana Schutz, Floating Pieta, 2020 (detail)

Schutz “vivifies present conditions of life on a faltering planet as dramatically as an artist can while staying devoted to aesthetic ideals.”

—Peter Schjeldahl, critic

Dana Schutz, Floating Pieta, 2020 (detail)

Josh Smith

Deep Mystery, 2019

Oil on linen

84 x 72 inches (213.4 x 182.9 cm)

Josh Smith’s prolific and expansive body of work utilizes unassuming visual motifs—including leaves, fish, skeletons, sunsets, and palm trees—to explore the potential of painting.

This work is part of an ongoing series that depicts the figure of death. Rendered in lush ribbons and fields of color, the blank, empty faces and shapeless cloaks of the Grim Reapers serve as genderless, formless ciphers. As with the artist’s other motifs, this choice of subject matter removes the imperative to find meaning or be confounded by the work.

Josh Smith, Deep Mystery, 2019 (detail)

Installation view, Miami NY, David Zwirner, New York, 2020. Featuring works, from left, by Josh Smith and Noah Davis

Nate Lowman

Katrina, 2020

Oil and alkyd on linen

90 1/8 x 126 1/8 inches (228.9 x 320.4 cm)

Since the early 2000s, Nate Lowman has brilliantly mined images from art history, the news, and popular culture, utilizing commonplace motifs to reflect on representation, celebrity, obsession, and violence. Lowman created this painting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The work depicts a satellite view of Hurricane Katrina, which brought mass destruction to the United States’ Gulf Coast in 2005. Like the pandemic, the hurricane became highly politicized as it exposed deep economic disparities. With Katrina, Lowman continues his ongoing fascination with the representation of America and its complexities, contradictions, and obsessions.

Nate Lowman, Katrina, 2020 (detail)

“The artist’s sociological impulse [is] to research and catalogue a world that is, for all its immediacy, more customarily, and more comfortably, seen at a distance.”

—David Rimanelli, critic

Nate Lowman, Katrina, 2020 (detail)

Installation view, Miami NY, David Zwirner, New York, 2020. Featuring works, from left, by Nate Lowman, Jordan Wolfson, Raymond Pettibon, and Diana Thater

Raymond Pettibon

Works on paper, 1998-2020

Dimensions variable

Raymond Pettibon’s influential practice draws from a wide spectrum of American iconography, engaging the visual rhetoric of pop and commercial culture while incorporating language from mass media and classic texts. His drawings, which recall the traditions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century satire and social critique, reinforce the importance of the medium within contemporary art and culture today.

Pettibon often installs his drawings in cloud-like clusters, creating a frenetic network of imagery and visual and textual references that mirrors the artist’s own working process. This installation comprises thirteen works on paper that are available individually.

Explore Works by Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Roll eyes warily...), 2019 (detail)

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Faster than a...), 2020 (detail)

Raymond Pettibon, No Title, 2017 (detail)

Jordan Wolfson

Untitled, 2020

UV print on brass, acrylic, adhesive vinyl, and steel hardware

84 1/4 x 73 x 4 1/2 inches (214 x 185.4 x 11.4 cm)

Jordan Wolfson’s thought-provoking work routinely comments on the persistent nostalgia, emotions, and memories attached to widely circulated media. This sculpture is part of a series of wall-mounted brass panels that feature prints of photographs from Wolfson’s childhood, the artist’s most personal panels to date.

While open to interpretation, the work serves as an indirect self-portrait. In contrast to many of his works featuring advanced digital and virtual technologies, the brass panels allude to ancient metallurgy, classical sculpture, and the radiant, gilded surfaces of churches and altarpieces from the Middle Ages.

Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2020

For Wolfson, personal and seemingly incongruous relationships between imagery and materials underscore the complex tensions and distortions the artist establishes in his work between reality and artificiality, subject and object, meaning and sense.

Jordan Wolfson, Untitled, 2020

Marcel Dzama

The end of the end times, 2020

Ink, watercolor, and graphite on paper

16 5/8 x 11 3/4 inches (42.2 x 29.8 cm)
Framed: 20 5/8 x 15 3/4 inches (52.4 x 40 cm)

Marcel Dzama is widely celebrated for his unique visual language that explores human motivation and the blurred relationship between reality and the subconscious. In his work, human characters, animals, and hybrids populate an uncanny universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales.

Dzama made this work amid the 2020 US presidential election and COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which the artist and much of the world was in quarantine. It depicts a figure sitting on the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty, while a grim reaper on horseback is visible in the clouds, an allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Marcel Dzama, The end of the end times, 2020 (detail)

Liu Ye

R, 2009

Screenprint

35 3/8 x 30 1/8 inches (89.7 x 76.4 cm)

Liu Ye is known for deeply meditative paintings that investigate ways of seeing in their nuanced approach to the painted image. His carefully balanced, methodical compositions subtly combine figuration and abstraction and reference a diverse range of aesthetic, literary, art-historical, and cultural sources.

This print relates to the artist’s Flagship series of paintings, depicting a sailor pulling back a curtain to reveal a large battleship. Sailors, whom the artist depicts as innocent-looking, cartoon-like children, often appear in Liu’s work. As art critic and curator Zhu Zhu has said, “the choice of a sailor boy as a personal symbol is definitely tied to memories of boyhood.”

Explore More Prints by Liu Ye

Liu Ye, R, 2009 (detail)