David Zwirner Books
Talk & Book Signing
Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art
Tuesday, March 12, 2019, 6:30 PM
New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture
Christian Viveros-Fauné will be in conversation with artist Lisa Yuskavage about her work in conjunction with his new book, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, which explores various moments of crisis and the ways in which they are reflected and preserved in relevant artworks. Taking the book as a starting point, Viveros-Fauné and Yuskavage will discuss the painted as political, touching on some of the artists featured in Social Forms, for example Francisco Goya, whose work has impacted Yuskavage’s practice. The discussion will be followed by a book signing.
New Release
Alice Neel: Freedom
One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people. Freedom documents the solo exhibition of the artist’s work at David Zwirner in New York in 2019. Including works that span the 1920s to the 1980s, this presentation focuses primarily on the nude figure—whether male or female, adult or child—and demonstrates how Neel rebelled against and challenged the traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty in our society. The catalogue includes newly commissioned scholarship by Helen Molesworth and a foreword by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel.
New Release
Sherrie Levine: After Reinhardt
New work by American artist Sherrie Levine engages her ongoing practice of appropriating artworks from the Western art historical canon—this time by taking Ad Reinhardt’s Blue Paintings as a point of departure. Levine has created abstract restatements of the 28 works that were on view, making use of pixilation to consolidate the range of blue tones in each painting into a single, truly monochromatic value. The publication features full color reproductions of Monochromes After Reinhardt: 1–28 and includes the 1965 text “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” in which Reinhardt famously interviewed himself.
New Release
Venus & Adonis
At once comic, tragic, and erotic, Venus & Adonis (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This new translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, the renowned painter celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form. Dumas’s complete suite of thirty-two works on paper is reproduced in this volume, exactingly placed by the artist throughout Shakespeare’s text. Copublished by Athenaeum and David Zwirner Books as an English/Dutch edition, the book is a striking yet beautiful paradox—a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.
New Release
Oscar Murillo: the build-up of content and information
The Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo is known for an inventive practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled. Published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition of paintings and works on paper at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2018, the build-up of content and information is accompanied by an essay by curator and writer Victor Wang, who attests to Murillo’s work as being guided by mobility.
Simon & Schuster and David Zwirner Books Announce Distribution Agreement
Simon & Schuster and David Zwirner Books have just announced a distribution partnership that will make David Zwirner the first gallery to have mainstream trade distribution of its titles in North America. Going forward, the roster will extend beyond traditional fine-art monographs and catalogues to other types of books, including fiction, politics, literature in translation, poetry, and plays.
Forthcoming
Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art
Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art explores the ways in which artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion. Presenting works from the twelfth century to the present day, eight centuries intersect and, as such, this wide-ranging catalogue examines affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time.
Forthcoming
Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals
The latest from the renowned painter—Marlene Dumas’s new works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery. Myths & Mortals is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.
New Release
Sherrie Levine: Diary 2019
Diaries and journals have a long, complex history within visual culture. American artist Sherrie Levine continues the tradition with Diary 2019 by making the private public. Inspired by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary and its famed opening entries, written in 1953— “Monday: Me. Tuesday: Me. Wednesday: Me. Thursday: Me.”—Levine prints the word “ME.” on each calendar page in Diary 2019. Levine’s diary is a playful riff on autobiography amidst our narcissistic culture.
New Release
The Sweet Flypaper of Life
The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a “poem” about ordinary people, about teenagers around a jukebox, about children at an open fire hydrant, about riding the subway alone at night, about picket lines and artist work spaces. This renowned, life-affirming collaboration between artist Roy DeCarava and writer Langston Hughes honors in words and pictures what the authors saw, knew, and felt deeply about life in their city.
Available in both softcover and hardcover editions.
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
The Psychology of an Art Writer
Giotto and His Works in Padua
New Release
Duchamp's Last Day
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, Duchamp’s Last Day offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours. Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.
New Release
On Contemporary Art
Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist César Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts. On Aira’s dizzying and dazzling path, everything comes under question—from reproducibility of artworks to the value of the written word itself. In the end, Aira leaves us stranded on the bridge between writing and art that he set out to construct in the first place, flailing as we try to make sense of where we stand.
David Zwirner Books
Bookstore, New York
535 West 20th Street, New York
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