David Zwirner Books
Bookstore, New York

Visit for new releases and special offers on a selection of publication, posters, zines, and editions.

May schedule
May 26: Closed

Current Exhibition
Rose Wylie: Lolita's House

Published on the occasion of Rose Wylie: Lolita’s House, this limited-edition zine presents a new series of paintings and works on paper made specifically for Wylie’s second solo exhibition at David Zwirner, London in 2018. Loosely referencing a house that was constructed across the street from Wylie’s residence in Kent, England, Lolita’s House continues the artist’s ongoing fascination with the shifting nature of memory and the multi-layered external associations that become attached to it over time.

Rose Wylie: Lolita's House
David Zwirner, London
April 20 - May 26, 2018

Current Exhibition
Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

In this exhibition, the artist’s second with the gallery and her first solo presentation in New York since 2010, Dumas debuts an expansive series of works on paper originally created for a recent Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus & Adonis (1593) by Hafid Bouazza. Tender and erotic with hints of violence, these drawings depict the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her tragic passion for the handsome youth Adonis in the artist’s singularly expressive ink wash.

Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals
David Zwirner, New York
April 28 – June 30, 2018

Current Exhibition
Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

Throughout her career, Marlene Dumas has continually created lyrically charged compositions that eulogize the frailties of the human body, probing issues of love and melancholy. At times her subjects are more topical, merging socio-political themes with personal experience and art-historical antecedents to reflect unique perspectives on the most salient and controversial issues facing contemporary society. The large-scale works included in Against the Wall are primarily based on media imagery and newspaper clippings documenting the conflict between Israel and Palestine, exploring the tension between the photographic documentation of reality and the constructed, imaginary space of painting.

Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals
David Zwirner, New York
April 28 – June 30, 2018

Forthcoming
Wolfgang Tillmans: DZHK Book 2018

Presenting recent developments in Wolfgang Tillmans’s portraiture and still lifes, Wolfgang Tillmans: DZHK Book 2018 features a broad selection of new and recent works that respond to their surroundings while at the same time embodying a self-contained environment. Published on the occasion of Tillmans’s exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong in 2018, this fully bilingual catalogue juxtaposes pictures of intimacy and friendship with views and angles of the world at large.

Wolfgang Tillmans
David Zwirner, Hong Kong
March 26 – May 12

New Release
Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun

The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication includes an essay by critic and curator Michael Bracewell, in which the author takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium.

Current Exhibition
William Eggleston

William Eggleston's work is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.The exhibition showcases Eggleston's Los Almos series, made between 1965 and 1974, in its entirety for the first time in New York.

William Eggleston: Los Almos
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
February 14 – May 28

Forthcoming
David Zwirner: 25 Years

Published on the occasion of the twenty-five year anniversary at David Zwirner, this book paints a picture of the gallery’s growth and development through the lens of the artists that have shaped it. Above all else, David Zwirner has been guided by its artist-centric ethos. In ambitious gallery shows at every location, the gallery’s emphasis has been on artists and facilitating their vision. With archival imagery form the very early days of the gallery on Greene Street in SoHo, to its transition and expansion to Chelsea, London, and the Upper East Side, the catalogue captures the gallery’s devotion to its inimitable roster of artists and estates.

David Zwirner: 25 Years
David Zwirner, New York
January 13 – February 17, 2018

New Release
Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 1, 1972–1994

The first volume of a comprehensive record of paintings by the prolific Belgian artist Luc Tuymans highlights his generative early work. 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.

Forthcoming
Felix Gonzalez-Torres

One of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s reduced formal vocabulary, conceptual rigor, and evocative use of everyday materials resonates with meaning that is at once specific and mutable, rigorous and generous, poetic and political. Featuring several key bodies of work from throughout the artist’s career, this publication showcases a series of distinct installations at David Zwirner in New York in 2017.

Opening with details of the exhibition and images of visitors in the spaces, the publication walks the reader through each piece. New text by David Breslin explores the variety of works included here while contextualizing Gonzalez-Torres’s contribution to art history.

New Release
R. Crumb: Bible of Filth

Featuring R. Crumb’s most outrageous sexual comics, Bible of Filth is possibly the dirtiest book around. This revised and expanded English edition contains all the original pieces from the 1986 volume, with over one hundred pages of additional material. Printed on bible paper and bound in leather, with gold debossing and edging, this volume looks and feels like a traditional bible, with no outward suggestion of what it contains.

New Release
Suzan Frecon: painting

The result of a deliberative process guided by careful attention to spatial relationships, Suzan Frecon’s large-scale oil paintings are composed of asymmetrical curves that result in minor and major measured areas of color. Accompanying the artist’s solo exhibitions at David Zwirner, New York and London, in 2017, this publication features a selection of new monumental paintings carefully reproduced both as individual works and in installation views to best convey the experience of seeing the work. A specially commissioned essay by acclaimed art historian Richard Shiff examines the new body of work in relationship to painting and the experience of looking.

New Release
Ruth Asawa

Known for her extensive body of intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency. Presenting an important and timely overview of Asawa's work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper, and more. Together the body of work demonstrates the centrality of Asawa’s innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the twentieth century.

ekphrasis series

The ekphrasis series is specially dedicated to publishing out-of-print, rare, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes. The series is part of an ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.

Available now
Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter
Chardin and Rembrandt
Degas and His Model
Pissing Figures 1280–2014
Letters to a Young Painter
Summoning Pearl Harbor

Forthcoming
The Psychology of an Art Writer
Giotto and His Works in Padua

New Release
The Psychology of an Art Writer

An openly lesbian avant-garde writer of science fiction, Vernon Lee—a pseudonym of Violet Piaget—is the most important female aesthetician to come out of nineteenth century England. Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy, and art criticism. David Zwirner Books is reintroducing Lee’s writing through the first-ever English publication of The Psychology of an Art Writer (1903) along with selections from her groundbreaking Gallery Diaries (1901–4), breathtaking accounts of Lee’s own experiences with the great paintings and sculptures she traveled to see.

New Release
Giotto and His Works in Padua

The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history, birth, life, and death of Christ, ranks among the greatest artworks ever created. Here, Ruskin examines the panels and brings them life, describing their many hidden details, all the result of Giotto’s unrivaled genius. It stands as Ruskin’s most compelling set of reflections on Giotto’s masterpiece—an artwork that, in Ruskin’s estimation, changed the very course of art history.

New Release
Letters to a Young Painter

"As for you, my dear Balthus, you surely know full well the love that connects us. Yours with all my heart, Rilke." – Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating Letters to a Young Painter, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his infamous Letters to a Young Poet, earlier correspondence from 1902 to 1908. In these eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke describes the challenges he faced, while opening the door for the young painter to take himself and his work seriously.

New Release
Summoning Pearl Harbor

"Now he had time to think. Tadayoshi Koga, 19 years old, had just crash-landed his Mitsubishi Zero airplane on the remote Aleutian island of Akutan. It was June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor..." – Alexander Nemerov

Summoning Pearl Harbor is a mesmerizing display of linguistic force that redefines remembering. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past? In this highly original meditation on the past, renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life.