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May 2018

Ruth Asawa: Monograph from David Zwirner Books

“The year’s most beautiful exhibition—yes, it’s September, but I’m willing to make the call now—is a survey of suspended hanging sculptures and works on paper by 

 at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. I write this less than an hour after leaving ‘Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work,’ so forgive me if I sound effusive. But I wager you wouldn’t demur. Out in the haze and heat shimmer of late-summer St. Louis, my body still hums with an unfamiliar sensation—of weightlessness, transparency and an almost rude elegance.

Asawa’s sculptures are intricate, organic-seeming things, made from crocheted copper, brass, galvanized steel and iron wire. They have an aura of casual prowess and the concision of crunched-down equations describing the curves of water droplets or summer weeds shooting skyward in spirals. You don’t expect sculpture to function as a visual correlative to swimming in air. Asawa found a way and, in so doing, found her voice.”

 is on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis through February 16, 2019. The David Zwirner 

 currently features a selection of prints by the artist.

, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, 2018. Photo © Alise O'Brien Photography



An installation view of the exhibition, Ruth Asawa: Life's Work at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, dated 2018.

"Is this the most beautiful show of the year?"

, ending in the early 1980s, the choice of whether, and how, to make art ‘black’ was a lively issue. And the show—organized by Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, curators at the Tate, and overseen in New York by Ashley James, an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum — is, among many other things, about the varied and inventive solutions artists came up with.

Certain early responses feel almost counterintuitive. In the same years that [Norman] Lewis was injecting topical stories into abstract painting, Roy DeCarava was experimenting with making photographic portraiture abstract. The face of the young woman in his famous image 

Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963 

has the weight of a monument. But a shot of John Coltrane from the same year has an aura-like blur, and a picture called 

 is a featureless glow, undefined by race or gender."

A detail of a photograph by Roy DeCarava, titled Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., dated 1963. 

“Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963 has the weight of a monument."

February 1–May 24, 2020

Wolfgang Tillmans Today Is The First Day

"As early as 1998, Tillmans felt that the world was 'over-photographed.' At the time, he turned to making pictures without a lens. The 

 images were made by passing paper through a dirty processing machine, capturing chemical residue with ghostly results. For his 

series, he exposed undeveloped photographic paper to handheld light sources. Eleven years later, finally embracing digital photography, he attempted to show how an image might still 'ring out' amid an inundation of photographs by looking at what had changed in the twenty years since he started taking pictures. The subjects of these photos, taken with a camera whose sensor was sharper than a human eye and collected in a book called 

(New World), included flat-screen monitors, the globalized uniform of sportswear, and the broader color spectrum of cities lit by L.E.D. lights. The sharpness of the digital image, which once struck him as 'inhuman,' was now the right medium for a world of high-definition screens and high-resolution printing.

At the back of the studio, in a large and mostly unfurnished room, new photos are printed and hung on the walls in a line. Tillmans comes in occasionally to look at them. It takes time to know if a picture is good, he said, as he stood quietly looking at a photograph of the sea, and, even then, 'I can’t know, I can only hope that they last. You can’t be too sure about something, because otherwise you’re too full of yourself or you can’t see if there is a weakness in the work.'

Tillmans walked over to a group of still-lifes on another wall. He stopped before one: an onion, sliced in half and placed on a piece of wood. 'They pull in different directions: attraction, beauty, obviousness, not obviousness, how they sit in relation to the genre as a whole, and how they sit in relation to the genre within my work—within the genre of still-lifes, in this case,' he said. He described how the pattern in the onion related to the pattern of the plywood. 'Is it striking in a good way, or is it too obvious, or too subtle? Sometimes it can’t be subtle enough, and sometimes the obvious is actually really good. . . . Even with a photograph of an onion, the stakes are high. 'Whatever I do is about picking examples, because you can’t show the whole world,' he said. 'You always have to find the whole in extreme detail.'"

A detail from a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans, titled sections, dated 2017.

"When he asks a question, one becomes aware of the difference between feigning knowledge and being knowledgeable."

What It Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics

 by Jarrett Earnest (David Zwirner Books, 2018) presents 30 very lively personalities. We learn how much the art world has changed in the past 50 years, why people become art critics, and how these critics understand contemporary art.

Barbara Rose describes her life in the 1960s with Frank Stella and Michael Fried, Lucy Lippard talks about her relationship with Eva Hesse, and Fried tells of supporting himself in London by writing a column for 

The role of the critic has changed dramatically. Artists, collectors, curators, and dealers are all needed for the system to function. But the role of critics is up for grabs. Partly the problem is that writing criticism has never been well paid. And gentrification has made the traditional role of an independent intellectual all but impossible."

Jarrett Earnest will be in conversation with Peter Schjeldahl and Paul Chaat Smith at the Strand book store in New York.

Image: 

What It Means To Write About Art: Interviews with art critics

Cover of a book titled  What It Means To Write About Art: Interviews with art critics, published by David Zwirner Books in 2018.

A "Marvelous Compendium"

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