An intimate conversation between old friends who’ve leaned on each other creatively since they were teenagers. Rainer Judd, a filmmaker, artist, and president of Judd Foundation, and the Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola talk about growing up with larger-than-life fathers in Donald Judd and Francis Ford Coppola, the necessity of creative “puttering,” and Coppola’s new film, On the Rocks, featuring an art world bon vivant played by Bill Murray.

You can watch 

, a survey exhibition devoted to Donald Judd, at our 19th Street gallery in New York through December 12.

Image: Sofia Coppola and Rainer Judd, photo booth in New York, 2014. Courtesy Rainer Judd

A black and white photo of Sofia Coppola and Rainer Judd, dated 2020.

Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

Sofia Coppola and Rainer Judd

Media

June 13, 2019–April 12, 2020

Dan Flavin

At the Museum of Modern Art

Donald Judd

June 15–September 22, 2019

Bridget Riley

 presents more than 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 

 (2016). This book will be published on November 12, 2019, and distributed through David Zwirner Books’s partnership with Simon & Schuster.

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 The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose.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, he 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.”

. The interviews expand upon the artist’s thinking present in 

 (Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).

A photograph of the cover of the book, titled Donald Judd Interviews, dated 2019.

Cover image: Gianfranco Verna with Donald Judd, 1984 (detail). Photo by Doris Lehni Quarella. © Antonio Monaci


A photograph of Gianfranco Verna with Donald Judd, dated 1984.

November 2019

Donald Judd Interviews

On class, race, art, and the Colombian and African diasporas

Oscar Murillo and Charles Henry Rowell

Listen Now

Chris Ofili and Emily Wilson

Alex Da Corte and Charlie Fox

October 9, 2019

When Donald Judd moved to the desert town of Marfa, in the 1970s, it was ranch country—and offered limitless space to work. In recent years, before it became an oasis of Instagram clout, Eileen Myles bought what they say is “the last cheap house in Marfa.” In this lively and freewheeling episode, one of America’s most recognizable poets and writers talks with Flavin Judd, Artistic Director of the Judd Foundation and part-time Marfa resident himself, about Marfa then and now, 

, Gertrude Stein and Andy Warhol, a “mammoth” new project and poetry’s comeback, how Myles found their utterly unique voice and where it overlaps with Judd’s art—and his own pioneering way with words.

, a collection of sixty interviews with the artist over four decades, was recently published by David Zwirner Books. (You can find it 

 will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Image: Eileen Myles and Flavin Judd, Hangar Studios, New York, September 2019. Photo by Alex Casto

A polaroid photo of Eileen Myles and Flavin Judd in 2019.

December 5, 2019

Flavin Judd and Eileen Myles

 at David Zwirner 19th Street in New York, we invite you to join Flavin Judd, artistic director of Judd Foundation, Daisy Desrosiers, the inaugural director of Artist Programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College, and the author and critic Jed Pearl in conversation, live on Zoom, on Thursday, December 3 at 6 PM EST. 

An installation view of an exhibition titled Donald Judd Artworks: 1970–1994, at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020.

Artist Talks and Events

On Donald Judd: Flavin Judd and Jed Perl in Conversation

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.