David Zwirner Books
Bookstore, New York

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

Closed for the remainder of the summer.
Will reopen September 12.

David Zwirner Books x Pilgrim Surf + Supply

David Zwirner Books heads east to Long Island this summer with some of our favorite books in tow, setting up camp at Pilgrim Surf + Supply in Amagansett. Stop by to browse new releases and old favorites.

August 1 – September 16
Pilgrim Surf + Supply, Amagansett

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.

Booth #H02

September 21 – 23
Preview: Thursday, September 20, 6 – 9 PM
MoMA PS1, London Island City, Queens

DZB @ The London Art Book Fair

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

September 7 – 9
Preview: Thursday, September 6, 6 – 9 PM
Whitechapel Gallery, London

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
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
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.

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.

Forthcoming
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
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.

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.