Featuring a single work made up of twenty-six drawings, Gerhard Richter''s newest artist book feels like a facsimile. ''[Richter''s drawings] are of stringent individuality and recognizably by Richter''s hand, not based on their signature style but rather because they make their theme the act of drawing itself, gauging the conditions of drawing.'' --Dieter Schwarz
In this new body of work, Richter combines various elements from a limited set of forms and techniques--including meandering lines, broad tonal planes applied with angled strokes of graphite, and passages of smudging, hatching, and erasure--thereby uniting choice and chance through this infinitely generative process. The resulting works on paper serve as condensed expressions, encapsulating and refining the fundamental principles that have consistently defined Richter''s artistic journey.
Reproduced at actual size, the drawings encourage in-depth observation as well as inspire compelling reimagining of abstraction.
The newest book from the widely revered Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama features her latest monumental and vibrant work and is the first to explore the experience of seeing it from the lens of the visitor
''My entire life has been painted here. Every day, any day. I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love for the universe.'' --Yayoi Kusama
One of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yayoi Kusama occupies a unique position within recent art history. Since the 1950s, she has created a profoundly personal oeuvre that resonates with a global audience. Distinctly recognizable, her works frequently deploy repetitive elements--such as dots--to evoke both microscopic and macroscopic universes.
Celebrating the visitor experience, this publication offers an immersive tour of Kusama''s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner New York. Illustrating thirty-five paintings, a gigantic sculptural maze of pumpkin walls, a lush garden of towering flowers, and a fan-favorite Infinity Mirror Room, the result is a book that offers the sense of experiencing the work in person for readers who have not had the chance.
New scholarship by Robert Slifkin looks at how Kusama innovates and complicates art historical traditions of image production and how her art seeks to connect humans with the greater cosmos. An essay by Lynn Zelevansky reflects on her own long-standing engagement with Kusama''s work and the ways in which it, across the decades, can be seen as a record of love in all its complexity: full of humanity, generosity, affection, sadness, and pain.
The Outlands, a series of photographs taken by Eggleston between 1969 and 1974, establishes the groundbreaking visual themes and lexicon that the artist would continue to develop for decades to come. The work offers a journey through the mythic and evolving American South, seen through the artist's lens: vibrant colors and a profound sense of nostalgia echo throughout Eggleston's breathtaking oeuvre. His motifs of signage, cars, and roadside scenes create an iconography of American vistas that inspired a generation of photographers. With its in-depth selection of unforgettable images - a wood-paneled station wagon, doors flung open, parked in an expansive rural setting; the artist's grandmother in the moody interior of their family's Sumner, Mississippi home - The Outlands is emblematic of Eggleston's dynamic, experimental practice. The breadth of work reenergizes his iconic landscapes and forms a new perspective of the American South in transition.
Accompanying the ninety brilliant Kodachrome images and details, a literary, fictional text by the critically acclaimed author Rachel Kushner imagines a story of hitchhikers trekking through the Deep South. New scholarship by Robert Slifkin reframes the art-historical significance of Eggleston's oeuvre, proposing affinities with work by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Smithson. A foreword by William Eggleston III offers important insights into the process of selecting and sequencing this series of images.
Stunning translations of images from the internet and the artist''s iPhone to canvas, Luc Tuymans''s quiet paintings belie an underlying moral complexity.
''Once Tuymans''s muted compositions felt fatalistic; now they appear as committed assaults on our digital fragmentation and the lies that thrive in its cracks.'' - Jason Farago, The New York Times
One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive figurative style beginning in the 1980s that has proven singularly influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans''s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously convey and conceal meaning. Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist''s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources.
This monograph of recent work reveals how Tuymans''s paintings grasps the mystery, strangeness, and possibilities of contemporary image making. It highlights a body of work that Tuymans has been working on since 2020, bringing together three exhibitions: Good Luck, at David Zwirner, Hong Kong; Eternity, at David Zwirner, Paris; and The Barn, at David Zwirner, New York. For this trilogy, Tuymans has heightened the contrast and saturation in his paintings, underscoring the urgency of our contemporary global moment. With an introduction by Joshua Cohen, and texts by the art historians Jonathan Crary and eric de Chassey, the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, and the writer Su Wei, this publication offers an in-depth, dimensional understanding of both Tuymans''s outlook and his assertion of the relevance of painting in our digitally saturated world.
Pettibon is known for his characteristically youthful aesthetic and sharply satirical critique of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low culture. Perhaps most poetic of the many motifs present in Pettibon's oeuvre is the surfer. In 1985 Pettibon began Surfers--a series he continues to work on to this day--popular for its depiction of the lone surfer silently carving "a line of beauty," along an impossibly large wave.
This publication traces a selection of one hundred surfers from the series, from smaller monochromatic works on paper to colorful large-scale paintings applied directly to the wall. For Pettibon's protagonist in these works-his countercultural hero-surfing exists apart from all else. Momentarily he achieves sublimity on the wave, distant yet synced with turbulent reality. We are forced to confront our own scale: small and feeble in the face of so much sublime power. Pettibon's lyrical writings on these painted surfaces-both his own and taken from literature-reference his own philosophies and the confusions of reality-he critiques the hypocrisies and vanities of the world he engages. To help navigate, the renowned New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan, perfectly distills the transcendent nature and lack thereof in Pettibon's work.
With a career spanning more than sixty years, the renowned painter Gerhard Richter is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book celebrates the artist's continued dedication to experimentation and innovation.
The Abstract Pictures were created when Richter, a few years ago, poured colored enamel paints onto a glass plate and allowed them to flow into one another in order to take shapes. He then captured these ephemeral moments with his camera and selected 100 of these "pictures" for inclusion in the book alongside equally abstract texts formed by randomly generated letter combinations.
An artwork of its own, this intimate volume inspires both close looking and a beautiful interpretation of abstraction.
Cette collection des dernières peintures de Mamma Andersson met en lumière la beauté et le mystère de la nature et l'effacement du temps. Dans une série d'oeuvres oniriques inspirées des intérieurs et des paysages de son enfance, la peintre suédoise Mamma Andersson s'interroge sur la frontière entre réalité et illusion. Elle introduit des teintes chaudes et réfléchies dans une palette de couleurs autrement froides et sourdes, conférant un sentiment d'un autre monde aux scènes et aux sujets du quotidien qui peuplent ce nouveau corpus d'oeuvres, toutes réalisées entre 2020 et 2021.Avec un essai de Karl Ove Knausgaard conçu comme une méditation sur les souvenirs d'enfance d'exploration insouciante et sur le portail que l'art crée entre le monde dans lequel nous vivons et les mondes qu'Andersson évoque avec son pinceau.
"I am sometimes asked 'What is your objective' and this I cannot truthfully answer. I work 'from' something rather than 'towards' something. It is a process of discovery." Since 1961, Riley has focused exclusively on seemingly simple geometric forms, such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, arrayed across a surface-whether a canvas, wall, or paper-according to an internal logic. The resulting compositions actively engage the viewer, at times triggering sensations of vibration and movement. In the present selection, Riley advances her Measure by Measure series, her most extensive body of work to date, into a new, darker color palette. Once again, changing the way we look and offering a powerful effect on our eyes.
This sense of dynamism was explored to great effect in the artist's earliest black-and-white paintings, which established the basis of her enduring formal vocabulary. In 2020, after visiting her own earlier works at her retrospective exhibition organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, Riley returned to black-and-white lozenges, adjusting the orientation of each shape to create a new visual sensation. In 1967, Riley introduced colour into her work, thus expanding the perceptual and optical possibilities of her compositions.
Published on the occasion of the 2021 exhibition at David Zwirner, London, this monograph features new scholarship on the artist by art historian Eric de Chassey, who looks at how Riley's past, as well as previous artists, has led to this body of work.
La peintre suédoise Mamma Andersson s'inspire d'un large éventail de sources photographiques, de l'histoire de l'art, de l'imagerie cinématographique, des décors de théâtre et des intérieurs d'époque, ainsi que de la topographie du nord de la Suède. Les peintures et oeuvres sur papier rassemblées dans ce volume explorent l'atmosphère et l'ambiance à travers des représentations de masques, de statues et de figurines, qui prennent une qualité onirique et mythique dans des silhouettes austères. Tout en rappelant les genres classiques de la nature morte, du paysage et des intérieurs, ces oeuvres, realisées en 2021 et 2022, mélangent le sens du passé, du présent et du futur. Avec un nouvel essai de Karl Ove Knausgaard sur l'histoire et l'évolution du désir humain de représenter notre environnement.
Peyton''s new work unveils a holy world of cultural luminaries''Here, Peyton turns her subjects into something akin to these mythical beings, bathing them in light and rendering them with a delicate touch'' --Cultured Magazine
Well known for her vibrant portraits of cultural and historical figures and friends that embrace the tradition and sensibility of 19th-century painting, Peyton captivates audiences with her distinctive blend of contemporary and classical aesthetics. In this new body of work, Angel, Peyton treats her subjects akin to celestial beings, illuminated by the intensity of her unique, humanistic approach. Through meticulous observation that closely resembles love, she captures the individuality of each subject. Together, these works become a painted world evoking the ecstatic force felt in cathedrals and on mountain tops.
Published on the occasion of her exhibition at David Zwirner London in 2023, this publication includes a text by Lucas Zwirner in which he considers the emotional experience of sitting for a portrait by Peyton and sheds light on the artist''s literary and cultural influences. Also included are Peyton''s own photographs conveying her influences and experiences in the lead-up to the exhibition.
"Revelatory and sublime...Her work remains conceptually open enough for viewers to draw their own conclusions, insert their own meaning and feel transported to other glorious worlds." -The New York Times.
One of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century, Hilma af Klint was a pioneer of abstraction. Her first forays into her imaginative non-objective painting long preceded the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian and radically mined the fields of science and religion. Deeply interested in spiritualism and philosophy, af Klint developed an iconography that explores esoteric concepts in metaphysics, as demonstrated in Tree of Knowledge. This rarely seen series of watercolors renders orbital, enigmatic forms, visual allegories of unification and separateness, darkness and light, beginning and end, life and death, and spirit and matter.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge at David Zwirner New York in 2021 and David Zwirner London in 2022, this catalogue features a text by the art historian Susan Aberth examining af Klint's spiritual and anthroposophical influences. With a conversation between the curator Helen Molesworth and the US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo discussing connections between Tree of Knowledge and native theories about plant knowledge, the publication broadens the scope of philosophical interpretations of af Klint's timeless work. Also included is a newly commissioned essay by the celebrated af Klint scholar Julia Voss, a contribution by the artist Suzan Frecon, and a text by art historian Max Rosenberg that further develops the conversation around why af Klint's work was not recognized in its time.
As articulated by art critic and poet Akira Tatehata in his accompanying catalogue essay, "the genius that generates [Kusama's] fertile artistic world, a paean to life, is driven by obsessive thoughts"-and her extraordinary and highly influential career encompasses works in various mediums that unfailingly conjure both microscopic and macroscopic universes at once. Kusama's critically acclaimed inaugural 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York presented a selection of the artist's large-scale square-format acrylic on canvas paintings. This vibrant publication- printed with multiple inks at the highest quality to fully capture the dazzling glow of Kusama's colorful canvases-opens with a selection of these works, which anchored the gallery presentation. Kusama's practice recurrently integrates motifs that evoke the cosmic and the primordial, from the ethereal to earthly, and embodies the unique amalgamation of representational and non-representational subject matter. Also featured are stills of the video installation SONG OF A MANHATTAN SUICIDE ADDICT, as well as stunning panoramic views of the exhibition's two infinity rooms, including INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM - THE SOULS OF MILLIONS OF LIGHT YEARS AWAY, which was hailed by The New York Times as encouraging "the ultimate selfie." The other room, LOVE IS CALLING, stands out as among the artist's most immersive environments to date: a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms covered in her signature polka dots, extending from floor to ceiling and slowly shifting color. Concluding the publication, an original poem written by Kusama herself, After the Battle, I Want to Die at the End of the Universe, contextualizes her practice: "Having always been distressed over how to live," she writes, "I have kept carrying the banner for pursuit of art."
Cette monographie, publiée par la galerie David Zwirner, revient sur les peintures et oeuvres sur papier de l'artiste britannique, mettant l'accent sur son utilisation récurrente de la ligne.
A joining of two artists, exploring their shared fixation on the problematics of architecture, language, institutions, scale, and value
''[The exhibition is] powerful and unhinged and overbuilt-a monument to the entropy of the postindustrial city, and the tenuous dance of its inhabitants.'' - The New York Times
Gordon Matta-Clark and Pope.L are esteemed for their respective interdisciplinary practices that examine the value and paradoxes of urban life as well as the risk inherent in art making. Utilizing performance, film, drawing, and various multimedia projects, the two artists often open up interstitial spaces by realizing sweeping gestures that take into account shifting, decentralized zones. Grounded in the concept of failure, the sixth exhibition at 52 Walker and its accompanying catalogue reconsider societal, artistic, and structural failure-and in its expression a consideration of hope.
With an introduction by the curator and director of 52 Walker Ebony L. Haynes, this publication also includes a conversation piece between Haynes, the artist Pope.L, and the director of LAXART, Hamza Walker, that discusses the visual, material, and conceptual similarities between Pope.L''s and Gordon Matta-Clark''s work and what it means to treat the possibilities of failure as an artistic medium.
About Clarion
The Clarion series of illustrated publications is positioned as an extension of each exhibition at the groundbreaking gallery space 52 Walker, curated by Ebony L. Haynes. The program focuses on showcasing conceptual and research-based artists from a range of backgrounds and at various stages in their careers. The series title is derived from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers'' Workshop, the oldest of its kind, at the University of California, San Diego. Octavia Butler attended this workshop in the 1970s. Butler''s writing has been influential in the conceptual framework of the program and the Clarion series. With a sleek design influenced by encyclopedias, each publication features color reproductions of the works on view, alongside an introduction by Haynes, commissioned essays, artist texts, archival materials, and more.
