David Zwirner Books
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DZB @ NY Art Book Fair
This year, David Zwirner Books is proud to present What it Means to Write About Art, a collection of thirty interviews with art critics by Jarrett Earnest. Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, the publication offers an unprecedented overview of American art writing, charting the role of the critic as it has evolved form the 1960s to today, providing an invaluable resource for aspiring artists and writers alike.
September 21 – 23
Preview: Thursday, September 20, 6 – 9 PM (ticketed)
Booth #H02
MoMA PS1, London Island City, Queens
Launch Event
Sunday, September 23, 1 – 2 PM
The Classroom
Jarrett Earnest and Lynne Tillman discuss the problems and possibilities of conducting interviews with artists and writers, launching Earnest’s new book What It Means To Write About Art: Interviews with art critics.
Panel Discussion
The Psychology of an Art Writer
David Zwirner Books is delighted to host a panel discussion to mark the occasion of the publication of Vernon Lee’s The Psychology of an Art Writer. Please join us at The Swedenborg Society to hear Michael Bracewell, Cally Spooner, Professor Patricia Pulham, and Dr. Francesco Ventrella discuss this new publication.
The Swedenborg Society, London
Wednesday, September 26
Door 6.30 PM. Discussion 7 PM
Seating is limited. RSVP for free here.
David Zwirner Books
Bookstore, New York
Visit for new releases and special offers on a selection of publication, posters, zines, and editions.
Open next
Saturday, September 29, 10 AM – 6 PM
Forthcoming
Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life
Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life documents the artist’s exhibition at David Zwirner’s Chelsea location in New York in late 2017, featuring a selection of paintings from her iconic My Eternal Soul series, new large-scale flower sculptures, a polka-dotted environment, and two Infinity Mirror Rooms. The monograph includes new scholarship on the artist by Jenni Sorkin, as well as a special foldout poster.
Forthcoming
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.
New Release
Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost
In 2017, Chris Ofili photographed chain-link fences throughout the island of Trinidad in order to explore notions of beauty, community, liberation, and constraint. This series of arresting images—“pocket photography,” as described by the artist—is the first body of photography ever published by Ofili. Through these entrancing black-and-white photographs, the artist engages with the diverse sources that inspired his critically acclaimed Paradise Lost exhibition at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017.
Forthcoming
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
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.
New Release
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.
New Release
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.
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.
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 from 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.
Forthcoming
What it Means to Write About Art
In the last fifty years, art criticism has flourished as never before. Moving from niche to mainstream, it is now widely taught at universities, practiced in newspapers, magazines, and online, and has become the subject of debate by readers, writers, and artists worldwide. Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, What it Means to Write About Art offers an unprecedented overview of American art writing. These thirty in-depth conversations chart the role of the critic as it has evolved from the 1960s to today, providing an invaluable resource for aspiring artists and writers alike.
Forthcoming
Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art
In an increasingly polarized world, with shifting and extreme politics, Social Forms illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance. Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through crucial artworks, it also asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises.
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.
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
Forthcoming
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.
Forthcoming
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.