David Zwirner Books
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.
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.
David Zwirner Books
Bookstore, New York
Extended hours for the holidays! Visit for new releases and special offers on a selection of publication, posters, zines, and editions.
Open
Thursday – Saturday
November 15 – December 15, 10 AM – 6 PM
New Release
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.