David Zwirner Books
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David Zwirner Books
Bookstore, New York
Visit for new releases and special offers on a selection of publication, posters, zines, and editions.
Summer Hours
Through August 31
Wednesday, 10 AM – 6 PM
Thursday, 10 AM – 6 PM
Friday, 10 AM – 6 PM
535 West 20th Street, New York
San Francisco Art Book Fair
Visit David Zwirner Books at the 2018 SF Art Book Fair, an annual multi-day festival of artists' publications.
This year, David Zwirner Books is proud to present Ruth Asawa. Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist’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. Our booth will showcase the book along with a selection of prints by the artist.
Current Exhibition
Carol Bove
Characterized by compositions of various types of steel, Bove’s ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” begun in 2016, amalgamates theoretical and art-historical influences across time periods and disciplines, much like the Chicago Imagists of the 1960s, whose collagist aesthetic combined disparate styles and techniques. To create these abstract assemblages, Bove combines, in differing permutations, geometric tubing that has been crushed and shaped at the studio, found metal scraps, and a single highly polished disk. Luminous color is applied to parts of the composition, transforming the steel—more commonly associated with inflexibility and heft—into something that appears malleable and lightweight, like clay, fabric, or crinkled paper.
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. 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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.