David Zwirner – förlag

A must-have for punk rockers, art historians, and all music and art lovers in between. The definitive collection of Raymond Pettibon’s album covers, uniting art and music in one powerful visual history. Featuring work for Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Iggy Pop, Lana Del Rey, and many others, this volume traces the artist’s bold influence on alternative culture from the late 1970s to today.Throughout his decades-long career, Raymond Pettibon has remained deeply engaged with the world around him, whether through biting political satire of American geopolitics or poetic meditations on surfing and baseball. Pettibon’s aesthetic and political sensibilities originated in the punk scene that thrived in Southern California, the artist’s first home, in the late 1970s and 1980s—evidenced in his collaborations with bands such as the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Saccharine Trust. Among the most iconic works featured in this collection is Pettibon’s four-column logo design for Black Flag. His distinctive artwork appears on albums for a wide range of legendary musicians, including Iggy Pop, Foo Fighters, and Lana Del Rey, among many others.Nervous Breakdown spotlights the artist’s enduring impact on the music industry, presenting for the first time every record, CD, and cassette cover since 1978 that features his artwork. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany, this catalogue features more than two hundred works from the Stefan Thull Collection. With essays by Max Dax, Robert Eikmeyer, and Ulrich Loock, and a 1985 Artforum essay by Kim Gordon, the book includes a catalogue raisonné of Pettibon’s album artwork, an essential resource for fans, scholars, and collectors of contemporary art and music history alike.

In her most personal book to date, Yayoi Kusama brings us into her private world through poetic recollections, giving insight into her creative process and the essential role language plays in her work and daily life.With a new focus on Kusama’s use of language, this book gives an impressive overview of her poetry, which the artist creates alongside her work in other media. Highlighting the importance of language to Kusama, the book draws special attention to the captivating poetic titles of her paintings, such as in I WOULD LIKE TO SHOW YOU THE INFINITE SPLENDOR OF STARDUST IN THE UNIVERSE and FIGURE OF THE MIDNIGHT DARKNESS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT I DEDICATED ALL MY HEART. These visionary titles are a quintessential part of Kusama’s eye-catching artworks, but also hold their own as unique aphorisms and appealing statements of cosmic spirituality. The poetry collected here touches on Kusama’s personal triumphs and trials, her human ideals, and her heroic pursuit of art and peace above all else.Centered around EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE, Kusama’s acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this book features more than 300 pages of new paintings, sculptures, and Infinity Mirrored Rooms. It also includes photographs of Kusama over time, offering a unique visual timeline of this iconic artist.

One of the most beloved painters of the twentieth century, Giorgio Morandi created works that continue to exert their mysterious power on viewers worldwide. This publication focuses on the period from 1948 to 1964, during which Morandi developed and refined his investigations of serial, reductive, and permutational forms and compositions, a body of work that has had a profound influence on twentieth-century art and painting. Included here are five of the ten iconic “yellow cloth” paintings from 1952, a series featured prominently in the historic 1998 exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and numerous late paintings by the Italian master. Lavishly reproduced, these immersive plates draw attention to the idiosyncratic perspectival and color-driven decisions that give the work its abstract power. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2015 exhibition of Morandi’s paintings from this period at David Zwirner, New York—which, according to The New York Times, represent “lucid perfection, at once cerebral and impassioned.” It marked the first major presentation of the artist’s late work in America since the acclaimed 2008 retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In addition to an essay by Laura Mattioli and a foreword by David Leiber, who organized the exhibition, this catalogue includes a fantastic array of contributions by contemporary artists: John Baldessari, Lawrence Carroll, Vija Celmins, Mark Greenwold, Liu Ye, Wayne Thiebaud, Alexi Worth, and Zeng Fanzhi. They offer their personal responses to Morandi’s work and to the Zwirner exhibition in particular. Working in different media across many disciplines, this diverse list of contributors is a testament to the reach of Morandi’s paintings and their influence on contemporary art.

“All this must be either surfed or painted”: This is the underlying sentiment behind Raymond Pettibon’s iconic paintings of surfers and waves in this quintessential volume dedicated to the motif.Pettibon is known for his characteristically youthful aesthetic and sharply satirical critique of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low culture. Perhaps most poetic of the many motifs present in Pettibon’s oeuvre is the surfer. In 1985 Pettibon began Surfers––a series he continues to work on to this day––popular for its depiction of the lone surfer silently carving “a line of beauty,” along an impossibly large wave. This publication traces a selection of one hundred surfers from the series, from smaller monochromatic works on paper to colorful large-scale paintings applied directly to the wall. For Pettibon’s protagonist in these works—his countercultural hero—surfing exists apart from all else. Momentarily he achieves sublimity on the wave, distant yet synced with turbulent reality. We are forced to confront our own scale: small and feeble in the face of so much sublime power. Pettibon’s lyrical writings on these painted surfaces—both his own and taken from literature—reference his own philosophies and the confusions of reality—he critiques the hypocrisies and vanities of the world he engages. To help navigate, the renowned New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan, perfectly distills the transcendent nature and lack thereof in Pettibon’s work.

I carry my landscapes around with me focuses on American abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s.Mitchell’s exploration of the possibilities afforded by combining two to five large canvases allowed her to simultaneously create continuity and rupture, while opening up a panoramic expanse referencing landscapes or the memory of landscapes. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Art critic John Yau lauded her paintings as “one of the towering achievements of the postwar period.” Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2019, this book offers a unique opportunity to explore the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative area of Mitchell’s extensive body of work. It not only features reproductions of each painting in this selection as a whole, but also numerous details that allow an intimate understanding of the surface texture and brushwork. In the complementing essays, Suzanne Hudson examines boundaries, borders, and edges in Mitchell’s multipanel paintings, beginning with her first work of this kind, The Bridge (1956), considering them as both physical and conceptual objects; Robert Slifkin discusses the dynamics of repetition and energy in the artist’s paintings, in relation to works by Monet and Willem de Kooning, among others.

A new collection of photographs by Diane Arbus illuminates her singular ability to enter private worlds. Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum brings together forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971. Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus (1923–1971) was frequently invited into personal realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, the photographs collected in this volume convey no sense of intrusion or trespass—instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment. Arbus’s desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Her subjects featured in Sanctum Sanctorum include debutantes, nudists, celebrities, aspiring celebrities, socialites, transvestites, babies, widows, circus performers, lovers, female impersonators, and a blind couple in their bedroom. Through a fresh consideration of little-known photographs among works that may be more familiar, this publication invites viewers to discover aspects of even well-known images that have previously gone unnoticed.

This volume brings together twenty-five of R. Crumb’s most ambitious, acclaimed, and profound comics. One of the most influential and iconic cartoonists of our time, R. Crumb is celebrated for pushing the boundaries of representation, mass consumerism, and polite society. The comics in this volume exemplify Crumb’s creative output over twenty-five years following his early experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s. The comics collected here depict characters searching for an understanding of the world around and within themselves. Through adaptation, autobiography, biography, and short fiction, Crumb—much like his subjects—demands we pay attention to our darkest desires, compulsions, fears, and obsessions. Existential Comics will also feature a new, introductory comic strip by Crumb, reflecting on his practice in the context of this volume. Editor Dan Nadel’s essay further weaves together Crumb’s life, career, and influences, delving into the creative environment that informed some of the artist’s most outstanding comics.

Discover Joan Mitchell’s powerful and dynamic work—spotlighted in this book as never before“An entry for one of the best shows of 2022. . . . Mitchell, then in her 50s, reaches peak form in gathering brushstrokes that flicker and burn like auras on fire.” —Jerry Saltz, New York magazine This highly anticipated publication focuses on the years 1979 to 1985—a significant and deeply generative period within Joan Mitchell’s decades-long career. As Mitchell became even more fully immersed in daily life at her property in Vétheuil, France—surrounded by lush gardens, and challenged and inspired by new creative relationships—her studio practice flourished and her work became even more ambitious and expansive. Executed in an increasingly bold palette, the works from this period exemplify Mitchell’s nuanced mastery of composition, scale, and color. In addition to her large-scale abstract works, this publication features numerous smaller paintings and a selection of archival materials. Included in the book are several texts that complement the illustrated works. A new essay by the bestselling author Julie Otsuka recollects her encounters with Mitchell’s paintings over the years. A fascinating conversation between Mitchell and the French philosopher Yves Michaud from 1986 is featured. Reflections by the artists Amy Sillman, Shinique Smith, and Lily Stockman each explore a unique component of Mitchell’s oeuvre or practice, underscoring Mitchell’s continued influence on artists today.

Elizabeth Peyton’s art is one of glances and gestures that become indistinguishable from her in the moment she paints them. The works are an expression of specificity, but also of Peyton’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subjects. There is a feeling that becomes cumulative in her art, unadulterated and almost destabilizing, built up through the many brush marks that characterize her surfaces. Through the depth of these images, constructed one stroke at a time, the emotional substrate of our reality is revealed. —Lucas Zwirner, “The Profession of the Painter,” in Angel Angel, Peyton’s debut monograph from David Zwirner Books, explores the artist’s extraordinary ability to identify with her subject matter, from Ang in the Mountains and Mani Rimdu to the subjects of Elvis Angel (Elvis' Eyes) and Titanic (Jack & Rose). These are paintings that dwell in the permeability of light and space, reveling in what Petyon calls “painting and art as a space to capture energy that can take you someplace else.” Published on the occasion of her exhibition Angel at David Zwirner London in 2023, this volume includes full color plates of eighteen new works, Peyton’s own photographs connected by “the feeling of love, faith, and nature moving through all of them,” and a text by Lucas Zwirner.

Joe Bradley’s colorful and dynamic paintings invite viewers to consider the interplay between the deliberate and spontaneous, and the abstract and figurative.American artist Joe Bradley is widely recognized for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting as well as sculpture and drawing. Over the past twenty years, Bradley has continually reinvented his approach to art, creating a distinctive body of work that has ranged from modular, minimalist-style paintings and sculptures to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces featuring pictographic and abstract elements, to refined and layered compositions that, as critic Roberta Smith notes, “balance gracefully between representation and abstraction.”Joe Bradley: Vom Abend/Animal Family presents work from two celebrated exhibitions at David Zwirner, in New York and London in 2024 and 2025. Bradley worked on the paintings in these two groups simultaneously, and their mutual influence is perceptible in the presence of shared or repeated colors, forms, and shapes. These paintings suggest a new turn in the artist’s practice, as figurative elements emerge as central compositional structures. Accompanying works on paper further illuminate Bradley’s multidimensional practice. An essay by art critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith situates this series within the artist’s larger oeuvre, discussing Bradley’s evolution in art-historical and formal terms.

Andersson’s works embody a new genre of landscape painting that recalls late nineteenth-century romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions. Her panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up. The paintings utilize a selection of motifs from throughout her career: barren branches and thick-barked pine trees, domestic interiors, horses, and young women. Resembling still lifes, they further a tradition of quiet, dreamlike domestic scenes by Scandinavian artists such as Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944). Part of a self-conscious effort to capture an experience rather than a specific event, the compositions are freer and more abstract.Splendid color reproductions bring the textured brushstrokes, loose washes, and stark graphic lines to life on the page. The book also features a new essay by critically acclaimed author Karl Ove Knausgaard. The Lost Paradise is published on the occasion of an eponymous exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020.

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojève defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, “The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky,” endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojève suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojève’s text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted question: What is beauty?Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojève’s life and writings.

Adieu Maria Magdalena considers recurring themes and motifs from Mamma Andersson’s oeuvre and suggests complex and potent feelings related to loss. Finding inspiration in work by other Scandinavian painters, including Carl Fredrik Hill and Vilhelm Hammershøi, Andersson explores the tension between interiority and the external world, imbuing her compositions with a haunting stillness and introspection. Departing from earlier oil-on-board paintings, the paintings in this body of work primarily utilize canvas, a support that allows Andersson to create at a larger scale and expand compositional possibilities within the pictorial space. Employing trompe l’oeil, the artist produces a subtly claustrophobic effect in domestic spaces by layering uncanny interior scenes taken from her own home and her imagination, an interplay of surfaces and imagery that probes the nature of representation. This catalogue, published on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris, at David Zwirner, and a companion to three other volumes of recent work, marks a metaphorical farewell to a previous phase in her life. The author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a frequent collaborator of Andersson’s, provides an accompanying text, offering an oneiric perspective on the artist’s evocation of layered dimensions.

This momentous publication catalogues the last major group of William Eggleston’s photographs to ever be produced using the dye-transfer method, the format in which he originally presented his work. Eggleston’s vivid photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. One of the foremost practitioners in the medium’s history, Eggleston is widely considered the father of color photography. He pioneered the use of dye-transfer printing for art photography in the 1970s. The technically advanced process—first developed by Kodak in the 1940s—allowed him to achieve the richness of tonal depth and color saturation that he had been searching for. In the early 1990s, Kodak stopped producing the dyes, paper, and film used in the process. With the necessary materials now discontinued, and the bulk of what remained being used for the major group of work presented at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, The Last Dyes marks the final presentation of new works completed in this medium. The publication includes a new essay by Jeffrey Kastner, offering critical insights into Eggleston’s enduring influence at this turning point in the history of photography.

“Wylie fearlessly tackles the thorniest topics head-on, committing her thoughts and questions about politics, religion, fame, love, history, money and nature to canvas.” — Charlotte Brook, Harper’s BazaarInspired by film, pop culture, and the history of fashion as she experienced personally, Wylie harnesses a union of high and low culture with a bold technique of mark making. Her unique practice of material overlay and erasure creates fantastic compositions. Creating conceptual tensions between formal and informal aesthetics, Wylie employs the visual elements of text as formal details in her paintings.With a beautiful swiss binding, this monograph compiles the work of four exhibitions at David Zwirner offering a full breadth of Wylie’s most recent work to date. Giving insight and compassion to Wylie’s feminist and rebellious impulses, Judith Bernstein writes an accompanying text on how she relates to Wylie’s ambitious and playful energy. With a foreword by Nicholas Serota, this publication also features new essays by Barry Schwabsky and David Salle and an enlightening interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Victor Man is one of the most quietly commanding painters working today. His profound, enigmatic canvases occupy a singular place at the intersection of the spiritual and the material, the living and the dead.Victor Man’s paintings reveal varied, nonlinear references to literature, art, and poetry that transform essential elements of the human experience into visionary manifestations of color and form. The works collected in The Absence That We Are depict subjects imbued with a kind of sotto voce tonality. These compositions engender a complex, layered encounter, whose figures occupy and move through the transience of human life.In these paintings, Man positions mortality as an inherent presence within and successor to life—a process intimately linking the human realm with its natural, spiritual, and animal counterparts. His work carries a contemporary immediacy and primeval beauty, and is similarly marked by a nuanced intermingling of mourning and wonder, myth and earthly life. Ultimately, with their delicate, poetic treatment, Man’s paintings mediate between a sense of history and the experience of the world.This volume is produced on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition with David Zwirner, in London, Victor Man: The Absence That We Are. David Zwirner’s foreword to the volume highlights his personal interest in Man’s work. This catalogue also features an English translation of a traditional Romanian funerary chant recorded by the composer and ethnomusicologist Constantin Brailoiu; newly commissioned poetry by the Swedish artist Karl Holmqvist; and poetry by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl.

Discover Raymond Saunders’s dynamic paintings and his extraordinary legacy as an artist and thinker in his first monograph. Saunders’s work brings together his extensive formal training with his own observations and lived experience. His assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship. He subsequently adds other markings and materials, such as wallpaper, advertisements, rulers, and paintbrushes. Expressionistic swaths of paint and line drawings tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his physical surroundings at home and abroad, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, these richly built surfaces conjure a range of themes, allowing for a nuanced multiplicity of meanings. Documenting a two-part exhibition at David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps Gallery in 2024, this publication features a conversation between curator Ebony Haynes and the Studio Museum of Harlem director Thelma Golden about Golden’s multidecade engagement with Saunders’s artwork and writing. A facsimile of Saunders’s self-published pamphlet from 1967, Black Is a Color—his vital essay on the creative expression of the artist—is reproduced alongside new commentary by the art historian Darby English. An essay by Jarrett Earnest offers an in-depth interpretation of two of Saunders’s complex chalkboard works. Also included are a previously unpublished interview from 1980 between the artist and Judith Wilson and a pivotal text from 1993 by the art historian Richard J. Powell that offers a panoramic examination of Saunders’s art from 1968 to 1993, with a special focus on his iconic painting Dr. Jesus.

Virgina Woolf’s collection of writings on visual arts offer a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.Despite wide interest in Woolf's writings, her circle, and her relationship with the visual arts, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This newest edition in David Zwirner Books’s ekphrasis series collects such essays including “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), “Pictures” (1925), and “Pictures and Portraits” (1920). These formally inventive texts examine the connection between the literary writer and the visual artist and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and modern art as experienced in picture galleries. In these essays, Woolf looks at the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and the relationship between art and writing. An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.

Derek Jarman’s Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves as both a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love. “For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions.” —Derek Jarman Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s death due to an AIDS-related illness, Blue is a daring and powerful work of art. The film - and this highly-anticipated book’s text - serve as iconoclastic responses to the lack of political engagement with the AIDS crisis. Written poetically and surrealistically, Jarman’s text moves through myriad scenes, some banal, others fantastical. Stories of quotidian life––getting coffee, reading the newspaper, and walking down the sidewalk––escalate to visions of Marco Polo, the Taj Mahal, or blue fighting yellow. Facing death and a cascade of pills, Jarman presents his illness in delirium and metaphors. He contemplates the physicality of emotions in lyrical prose as he grounds this story in the constant return to Blue - a color, a feeling, a funk. Michael Charlesworth’s compelling introduction brings Blue into conversation with Jarman’s visual paintings as never before.

The first monograph on the internationally celebrated Nigerian American painter who blends her personal history and the African diasporic identity in layered compositions“Critics have often (and rightly) marveled at the care and finesse with which Akunyili Crosby assembles vast multiplicities of time and place into singular sites of visual contestation.” —FriezeNjideka Akunyili Crosby’s work unites multiple places and temporalities, reflecting both personal and universal dimensions of contemporary life and, in particular, the intricacies of the African diasporic identity. This first monograph on Akunyili Crosby brings together nearly fifty paintings, made from 2010 to 2023, that chart her methodical practice of layering painted representations of people, locales, and aspects of her own experiences with transferred images sourced from her personal collection, Nigerian publications, and other outlets. Akunyili Crosby reveals and revisits distinct realms, from lush gardens to domestic, interior worlds related to motherhood, family, marriage, the body, and personal identity. New texts from Jareh Das, Helen Molesworth, Jason Rosenfeld, and Drew Thompson focus on a range of themes in Akunyili Crosby’s work, including her visual language and material practice, her mixing of Western and Nigerian imagery and forms, and her use of photography in portraiture and figuration.

The Italian painter Giorgio Morandi is recounted as a friend and artist in this memoir by Luigi Magnani, an art historian and devoted collector of Morandi’s work. One of the most beloved and critically acclaimed artists of the twentieth century, Giorgio Morandi painted serial and permutational arrangements of everyday objects that elevated the quotidian into the sublime. In 1940, he struck up a decades-long friendship with entrepreneur, musicologist, art historian, and collector Luigi Magnani. My Morandi is the first full-length English translation of Magnani’s memoir reflecting on his bond with the artist and his long-standing academic and personal interest in Morandi’s paintings. In My Morandi, Magnani considers the artist’s aloofness from artistic trends and his dedication to painting for a small, discerning audience. He locates Morandi within the art-historical canon as well as recounts their artistic and intellectual kinship, which led to a unique, rich collection of Morandi’s work at Magnani’s villa in Mamiano, now the Magnani Rocca Foundation. Magnani’s personal collection of Morandi’s work was on view at David Zwirner, New York, in 2025. Originally published in 1982 in Italian, this memoir is accompanied by a new preface by Alice Ensabella and includes an introduction by Stefano Roffi, director of the Magnani Rocca Foundation.

Stunning translations of images from the internet and the artist’s iPhone to canvas, Luc Tuymans’s quiet paintings belie an underlying moral complexity. 'Once Tuymans's muted compositions felt fatalistic; now they appear as committed assaults on our digital fragmentation and the lies that thrive in its cracks.' — Jason Farago, The New York Times One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive figurative style beginning in the 1980s that has proven singularly influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously convey and conceal meaning. Rendered in a restrained and muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular media sources. This monograph of recent work reveals how Tuymans’s paintings grasps the mystery, strangeness, and possibilities of contemporary image making. It highlights a body of work that Tuymans has been working on since 2020, bringing together three exhibitions: Good Luck, at David Zwirner, Hong Kong; Eternity, at David Zwirner, Paris; and The Barn, at David Zwirner, New York. For this trilogy, Tuymans has heightened the contrast and saturation in his paintings, underscoring the urgency of our contemporary global moment. With an introduction by Joshua Cohen, and texts by the art historians Jonathan Crary and Éric de Chassey, the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, and the writer Su Wei, this publication offers an in-depth, dimensional understanding of both Tuymans’s outlook and his assertion of the relevance of painting in our digitally saturated world.

Celebrated British painter Rose Wylie—whose works are at once tactile, cerebral, and humorous—often draws her influence from a wide range of popular culture. Here her newest body of work references memories from her own life and mimics the way memories evolve and change over time.Wylie’s source material is culled from the vast visual world around her, ranging from sixteenth-century British estates to Serena Williams and the French Open. While initially these may seem random or aesthetically simplistic, through the nuanced use of humor, language, and compositional structure, Wylie creates wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, and visual representation itself, in line with the paintings she has become known for over the course of her career.A new essay by art critic Michael Glover explores the remarkable painter whose work has “spark, assurance, brash humor, an extraordinary, freewheeling eclecticism that seems to be just as ready to suck in references to the art of Ptolemaic Egypt and Roman portraiture as to pay homage to the films of Quentin Tarantino and the late paintings of Philip Guston.” Part of David Zwirner Books’s Spotlight Series, this book features Wylie’s newest paintings and drawings and is published on the occasion of the artist’s 2020 solo exhibition of these works at David Zwirner Hong Kong.

Set on a remote island, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an ideal subject for artist Rose Wylie, whose work frequently references classic stories and well-known characters.Likely the last play written entirely by Shakespeare, The Tempest brings together various themes the bard explored in his prior plays, including magic, revenge and forgiveness, order and society, and nature versus art. The shipwreck and remote island, the spirits, and the dukes and their children, offer rich material for Wylie’s works on paper and canvas.As the third title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series, this book pairs a complex narrative with equally layered works by a contemporary artist who approaches the play and art-making from a unique perspective.

This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality.In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting themes of mystery, myth, and the uncanny. Following the titular character Hebdomeros as he embarks on a series of philosophical musings and bizarre experiences divorced from a specific place or time, Hebdomeros embraces ambiguity in a profound exploration of the subconscious mind. Highly visual passages evoke the landscapes and compositions of de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, and non sequiturs mirror the freedom that Surrealism allowed for in art of all categories.An introduction by the scholar Fabio Benzi contextualizes de Chirico’s work within a broader modernist framework, highlighting its influence on surrealism and its resonance with the literary and artistic movements of the early twentieth century.

Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor’s book Cathedrals of France, first published in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Cathedrals were central to the way Rodin thought about his art: he saw them as visual metaphors for the human figure, among the finest examples of craftsmanship known to modern man, and as a model for how to live and work—slowly, brick by brick.Here, Corbett takes the fire at Notre Dame and the concerns over its restoration as an entry point in an exploration of Rodin’s cathedrals. Rodin adamantly opposed restoration, as he felt it often did more damage than the original injury. (Many of the cathedrals that Rodin looks at in his texts were, in fact, bombed during the war.) But while he rails against various restoration efforts as evidence that “we are letting our cathedrals die,” the book, with its tenderly rendered sketches and written portraits, is itself an attempt to preserve these cathedrals. The selection of texts in this volume is a reminder—as is the tragedy of Notre Dame—of why we ought to appreciate these feats of architecture, whether or not they are still standing today.

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s history of the urinating figure in art, Pissing Figures 1280–2014, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and limits in works of art in general. Lebensztejn is one of France’s best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of cognoscenti. First introducing the Manneken Pis—the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for a Belgian beer company—the author takes the reader through a semi-scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a fresco scene located directly above Cimabue’s Crucifixion from around 1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn’s careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar who looks like he is about to urinate through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate expertly through cultural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema, for example, and Marlene Dumas’s 1996–1997 homage to Rembrandt’s pissing woman. At every moment, Lebensztejn’s prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject matter entertaining.  In this short and poignant cultural history, readers not only find the care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one of the most interesting intellectuals of our time. The first widely distributed book of Lebensztejn’s in English, Pissing Figures 1280–2014 is simultaneously published in France by Éditions Macula.

An openly lesbian, feminist writer, Vernon Lee—a pseudonym of Violet Paget—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. An early follower of Walter Pater, her work is characterized by extreme attention to her own responses to artworks, and a level of psychological sensitivity rarely seen in any aesthetic writing. Today, she is largely overlooked in curriculums, her aesthetic works long out of print.  David Zwirner Books is reintroducing Lee’s writing through the first-ever English publication of "Psychology of an Art Writer" (1903) along with selections from her groundbreaking "Gallery Diaries" (1901–1904), breathtaking accounts of Lee’s own experiences with the great paintings and sculptures she traveled to see. Ranging from deeply felt assessments of the way mood affects our ability to appreciate art, to detailed descriptions of some of the most powerful personal experiences with artworks, these writings provide profound insights into the fields of psychology and aesthetics. Her philosophical inquiries in The Psychology of an Art Writer leave no stone unturned, combining fine-grained ekphrases with high fancy and dense abstraction. The diaries, in turn, establish Lee as one of the most sensitive writers about art in any language. With a foreword by Berkeley classicist Dylan Kenny, which guides the reader through these writings and contextualizes these texts within Lee’s other work, this is the quintessential introduction to her astonishing and complex oeuvre.