This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at Zwirner &amp; Wirth: Gerhard Richter: Landscapes May 4 – July 3, 2004

Gerhard Richter: Landscapes

Arts & Photography

RICHTER, Gerhard

History & Criticism

David Zwirner Books

Belgian filmmaker and painter Michaël Borremans (born 1963) has made a name for himself over the past two decades, though his figurative portraiture and pastoral scenes, indebted as they are to Manet, Degas and Velázquez, look of another time, the traditional Baroque and Rococo-esque style rendering the work unsettlingly familiar. Michaël Borremans: Horse Hunting, published on the occasion of the artist's second solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2006, is devoted to the 14 new paintings on view, among them the eponymous "Horse Hunting" (2005), which portrays a young man, fashionably attired, holding two twigs from each of his nostrils. Rendered in a palette of diffused, shadowy browns, oranges and grays, Borremans' work can be characterized by its lustrous surface and eerie exploration of mental states through the careful release and withholding of visual clues. This catalogue includes a text by Belgian artist and curator Hans van Heirseele.

Michael Borremans: Horse Hunting

Michaël Borremans

This concise and beautiful exhibition catalogue features arresting, colorful, Rorschach Test-like photograms of flowers by the esteemed Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, James Welling. For this series, Welling placed the blossoms of a common southern California plant on sheets of 8x10 film and exposed them to light. The negatives were then projected onto special photo paper through a color mural enlarger and color filters, to produce the dramatic, spectral, almost sun- or moon-dappled images reproduced here. Currently a professor of fine art at UCLA, Welling studied at CalArts in the early 1970s. Welling was the subject of a midcareer retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2000, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is represented in New York by David Zwirner Gallery and in Los Angeles by Regen Projects.

James Welling: Flowers

Individual Artists

Published to celebrate the critically acclaimed 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, a show that The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson called “near perfect,” Richard Serra: Early Work devotes over three hundred pages to a key five-year period of the artist’s earliest work. Anchored by exquisite black-and-white plates, from installation views of works in situ to documentary photographs, this “impressively realized” publication offers “a blow-by-blow account of Serra’s rapidly expanding art-world presence,” as described in a Bookforum review. Focusing specifically on work the artist produced during the period between 1966 and 1971, this classic tome documents the significance of his early work, with archival texts and reviews, alongside new scholarship by American art critic and historian Hal Foster. Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this monograph aims to reconsider the groundbreaking practices and ideas that so firmly situate Serra in the history of twentieth-century art. Its stunning selection of seminal works illuminates the debut of the artist’s innovative, process-oriented experiments with nontraditional materials, such as vulcanized rubber, neon, and lead, and introduces the interplay of gravity and material—of "verticality and horizontality,” writes Foster—that would remain a fundamental aspect of Serra’s production over the subsequent decades. Also featured in the publication are key early examples of the artist’s work in steel, as well as stills from some of his most important early films.

Richard Serra: Early Work

SERRA, Richard

Hailed by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker as “the most original, controversial, and expensive American artist of the past three and a half decades,” Jeff Koons has come to reign as a master of the market, a wry puppeteer with a “formidable aesthetic intelligence.” His elaborate, exquisitely produced sculptures draw from a contemporary lexicon of consumerism—often featuring large-scale reproductions of toys, household items, or luxury goods—while simultaneously holding up a mirror to the very culture from which they are extracted. These references to popular media are evidenced not merely in his choice of subject matter but also in his visual techniques: his sculptures frequently comprise smooth, mirrored surfaces, and his paintings employ bright and saturated colors. Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball—the first catalogue on the artist’s work to be published by David Zwirner—was produced on the occasion of the major 2013 exhibition at the gallery in New York, which marked the world debut of his Gazing Ball series, a brand new body of work that occupies an important place in the trajectory of his practice. Conceptually derived from the mirrored ornaments encountered on many suburban lawns, including those of Koons’s childhood hometown in rural Pennsylvania, every sculpture is anchored by a blue “gazing ball” of hand-blown glass. These are situated atop large, white-plaster sculptures that have been alternately modeled after iconic works from the Greco-Roman era, including the Farnese Hercules and the Esquiline Venus, or after such quotidian objects from the contemporary residential landscape as a rustic mailbox, a birdbath, and an inflatable garden snowman. Created in close collaboration with Koons, this elegant publication echoes the classic design of a 1970 Picasso catalogue that the artist admires. Inside, vivid color plates of the sculptures in situ capture the stark contrast between the pristine whiteness of the plaster and the highly reflective spheres. In their perfect contours and smooth, glistening surfaces, the gazing balls implicate audience as well as context—mirroring both and offering playful yet powerful meditations on the dialogue between gaze and reflection. “While all of the sculptures are grounded in their own distinct narratives, derived from Art History and suburban towns,” writes Francesco Bonami in his catalogue essay, “the seemingly fragile and delicate gazing ball establishes that sense of uncertain equilibrium that exists between history and fantasy, magic and materiality, mass culture and exclusive beauty.”

Jeff Koons: Gazing Ball

Koons, Jeff

Yayoi Kusama: I Who Have Arrived in Heaven features new work from the artist's critically acclaimed 2013 inaugural exhibition at David Zwirner, which spanned the gallery's three locations in New York. Kusama's extraordinary and highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design and interventions within existing architectural structures. Opening this book is a series of exquisitely produced color plates of brightly colored, large-format square paintings. Part of a recent body of work, they allude to universal spheres or basic life forms and highlight Kusama's unique amalgamation of representational and nonrepresentational subject matter. Also featured is the video installation, Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, in which the artist herself is seen performing a song she composed while an animated slideshow of selected artworks moves behind her and the two mirrored infinity rooms. Infinity Mirrored Room--The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away encompassed a cube-shaped, mirror-paneled room that featured a shallow reflecting pool as its floor; hundreds of multicolored LED lights were suspended at varying heights from the ceiling, flickering on and off in a strobelike effect. Another mirrored infinity room, Love Is Calling, stands as one of Kusama's most immersive, kaleidoscopic environments to date. It was composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms--covered in the artist's characteristic polka dots--that extended from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors.

Yayoi Kusama: I Who Have Arrived in Heaven

TATEHATA, AKIRA

In the summer of 2013, Raymond Pettibon took over one of David Zwirner’s gallery spaces in New York, transforming the high-ceilinged, garage-like white cube into his studio in order to prepare a show of drawings and collages within—and sometimes directly on—its walls. Titled To Wit, evoking the Middle English expression that has come to express a certain formality today and is defined as “namely,” or “that is to say,” the exhibition gave new meaning to the term “site specific,” featuring vibrant, gestural works Pettibon created in conversation with his surroundings that operated as a sort of archive, both product and record of his relationship to that space and time. Unified by their bold, vivid lines and unconventional framing, they feature allusions to a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from violence, humor, and sex to literature, youth, art history, and sports—embodying the artist’s signature mix of social and political commentary, diary entry, and automatic drawing. This publication, presenting large color plates of the works created over that summer by Pettibon, who also produced an original drawing for its sturdy cardboard cover, explores the intricate relationship between image and language that has long fascinated the artist. Just as the works in the exhibition existed at once as art and document, so too does the book itself have the hefty, physical presence of a work of art. Extensive installation views capture the dynamic combination of visual imagery and text that has come to characterize Pettibon’s practice, and a selection of gritty black-and-white photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s working process. Context is provided by Lucas Zwirner, who accompanied the artist throughout this period and contributed the book’s essay, “A Month with Raymond.” As Zwirner describes it, the show functioned “as an essayistic whole held together by imaginative leaps and subtle connections which Raymond has left unexplained and uninterpreted.” That perspective is rounded out in an interview with the artist by Kim Gordon, a visual artist and musician, who first encountered Pettibon’s work in the early 1980s in Los Angeles.

Raymond Pettibon: To Wit

Pettibon, Raymond

Published on the occasion of Bridget Riley’s major exhibition at David Zwirner in London in the summer of 2014, this fully illustrated catalogue offers intimate explorations of paintings and works on paper produced by the legendary British artist over the past fifty years, focusing specifically on her recurrent use of the stripe motif. Riley has devoted her practice to actively engaging viewers through elementary shapes such as lines, circles, curves, and squares, creating visual experiences that at times trigger optical sensations of vibration and movement. The London show, her most extensive presentation in the city since her 2003 retrospective at Tate Britain, explored the stunning visual variety she has managed to achieve working exclusively with stripes, manipulating the surfaces of her vibrant canvases through subtle changes in hue, weight, rhythm, and density. As noted by Paul Moorhouse, “Throughout her development, Riley has drawn confirmation from Eugène Delacroix’s observation that ‘the first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.’ [Her] most recent stripe paintings are a striking reaffirmation of that principle, exciting and entrancing the eye in equal measure.” Created in close collaboration with the artist, the publication’s beautifully produced color plates offer a selection of the iconic works from the exhibition. These include the artist’s first stripe works in color from the 1960s, a series of vertical compositions from the 1980s that demonstrate her so-called “Egyptian” palette—a “narrow chromatic range that recalled natural phenomena”—and an array of her modestly scaled studies, executed with gouache on graph paper and rarely before seen. A range of texts about Riley’s original and enduring practice grounds and contextualizes the images, including new scholarship by art historian Richard Shiff, texts on both the artist’s wall paintings and newest body of work by Paul Moorhouse, 20th Century Curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a 1978 interview with Robert Kudielka, her longtime confidant and foremost critic. Additionally, the book features little-seen archival imagery of Riley at work over the years; documentation of her recent commissions for St. Mary’s Hospital in West London, taken especially for this publication; and installation views of the exhibition itself, installed throughout the three floors of the gallery’s eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse located in the heart of Mayfair.

Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014

Riley, Bridget

Ad Reinhardt was one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century. He was also one of the few artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation to have painted abstractions from the start. “To him abstraction was not a genre or style,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter writes of him: “it was an ethos.” This extensively illustrated catalogue--the first comprehensive Reinhardt overview in 13 years--reproduces the artist’s signature “black” paintings (his 60 x 60 inch canvases of the 1960s, which he considered to be his “ultimate” aesthetic expression, and “the last paintings that anyone can paint”), as well as his cartoons and photographic slide presentations. Published to document a critically lauded exhibition at David Zwirner in New York in 2013, the monograph includes new scholarship by curator Robert Storr, in addition to an extensive chronology of the artist’s life. Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) was born in Buffalo, New York, and studied art history at Columbia University, where he forged lifelong friendships with the authors Thomas Merton and Robert Lax. After studies at the American Artists School, he worked for the WPA and became a member of the American Abstract Artists group, with whom he exhibited for the next decade; later he was also represented by Betty Parsons. Throughout his career Reinhardt engaged in art-world activist politics, participating in the famous protests against The Museum of Modern Art in 1940 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 (among the group that became known as “The Irascibles”).

Ad Reinhardt

STORR, Robert

“The people in these photographs had no walls up. They just accepted me and permitted me to take their photographs without any self-consciousness.” —Roy DeCarava. 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. Hughes’s heart-warming description of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s is seen through the eyes of one grandmother, Sister Mary Bradley. As she guides the reader through the lives of those around her, we imagine the babies born, families in struggle, children yet flourishing. We experience the sights and sounds of Harlem as seen through her learned and worldly eyes, expressed here through Hughes’s poetic prose. As she states, “I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.” DeCarava’s photographs lay open a world of sense and feeling that begins with his perception and vision. The ruminations go beyond the limit of simple observation and contend with deeper meanings to reveal these individuals as subjects worthy of art. While Hughes states “We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” the photographs bring us back to this lively dialogue and a complex reality, to a resolution that stands with the optimism of the photographic medium and the certainty of DeCarava’s artistic moment. In 1952 DeCarava became the first African American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The one-year grant enabled DeCarava to focus full time on the photography he had been creating since the mid-1940s and to complete a project that would eventually result in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a moving, photo-poetic work in the urban setting of Harlem. DeCarava compiled a set of images from which Hughes chose 141 and adeptly supplied a fictive narration, reflecting on life in that city-within-a-city. First published in 1955, the book, widely considered a classic of photographic visual literature, was reprinted by public demand several times. This fourth printing, the Heritage Edition, is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983 and includes an afterword by Sherry Turner DeCarava tracing the history and ongoing importance of this book.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life (softcover)

Hughes, Langston

DeCarava, Roy

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