A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Ruth Asawa with hanging wire sculpture, 1951. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust

This lushly illustrated book by collage artist Andrea D'Aquino brings Asawa's creative journey to life, detailing the influence of her childhood in a farming family, and her education at Black Mountain College where she pursued an experimental course of education with leading avant-garde artists and thinkers such as Anni and Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. Delightful and substantial, this engaging title for young art lovers includes a page of teaching tools for parents and educators.

The Story of Ruth Asawa

A Life Made by Hand

Patrick Modiano

Dominique Zehrfuss

Damion Searls

ekphrasis

Poems by Patrick Modiano. Illustrated by Dominique Zehrfuss. Translated with an introduction by Damion Searls

Published in English for the first time, 

 is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss.

 is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 

 captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano.

Zehrfuss’s paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover—perhaps they are not so different—relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing—poetry inspired by paintings—this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience.

First published by Editions de l’Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

28 Paradises

Yun Hyong-keun (1928–2007) was one of the most prominent abstract monochromists. Internationally admired during his life (Donald Judd was an advocate and friend), he belongs to a generation of artists whose influence has been crucial since the end of the Korean War. Both the war itself and its aftermath deeply affected the artist. In the 1970s Yun Hyong-keun joined the Dansaekhwa movement, a leading group of Korean artists whose monochromatic paintings intensively explored the effects and nature of color.

This handsomely produced volume, accompanying a major exhibition at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, offers a cornucopia of artistic and personal materials from the artist’s estate, which together provide great insight into the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most important abstractionists.

Yun Hyong-keun (Palazzo Fortuny)

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Fred Moten

Seeing Shakespeare

By William Shakespeare. Illustrated by Chris Ofili. Introduction by Fred Moten

 remains one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlights the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has.

In the twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in 

 the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him.

Dialogues:
The David Zwirner Podcast
Chris Ofili and Emily Wilson

 in front of an audience at the 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, and lies.

William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

Hafid Bouazza

Marlene Dumas

By William Shakespeare. Translated by Hafid Bouazza. Illustrated by Marlene Dumas

 (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s 

. This new translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, the renowned painter celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form.

Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem—bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion, a flower blooms to life. Desire in all its heady intensity is evocatively washed over the pages. As with Dumas’s wider body of work, however, tragedy is not forgotten and is frighteningly played out with equal intensity. The owl, “night’s herald,” as Shakespeare writes, flies jet black across the sky; a wild boar looms like a shadow over Adonis’s suffering, wounded body; black dissolves into gray; and bodies are lost in a sea of ink.

The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage—Venus’s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.

Dumas’s complete suite of thirty-two works on paper is reproduced in this volume, exactingly placed by the artist throughout Shakespeare’s text. Copublished by Athenaeum and David Zwirner Books as an English/Dutch edition, the book is a striking yet beautiful paradox—a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.

Venus & Adonis

Okwui Enwezor

Spotlight Series

Interview with the artist by Okwui Enwezor

Over the course of his three-decade career, Thomas Ruff has taken up many approaches to photography in his investigation into the status of the image in contemporary culture.

, the artist presents new work that continues his ongoing probe into the history, processes, techniques, and technology of photography. One of the most influential artists working with photography today, Ruff has redefined the medium’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and challenging the essence of the medium as a means for visual experience. He has investigated various photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, and landscape and architectural photography, using both analog and digital technologies, and culling imagery from scientific archives, print media, and the internet.

Presented here is a selection of Ruff’s most well-known works, as well as the newer 

 series, begun in 2018, which draws on negatives of India and Burma taken in the 1850s by Captain Linnaeus Tripe, an officer in the East India Company. Also included is a conversation between Ruff and Okwui Enwezor, which took place at Haus der Kunst in Munich, in connection with the artist’s retrospective then on view. The conversation, published here for the first time, has been edited for this volume and examines Ruff’s artistic practice and inspiration, serving as an engaging and dynamic introduction to the artist.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, 

 and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

Thomas Ruff: Transforming Photography (Bilingual)

Trine Otte Bak Nielsen

This original volume juxtaposes the work of two artists: the South African–born, Netherlands-based painter Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) and the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). Organized by Dumas, the project stems from her longstanding, personal connection to the works of Munch. The book focuses particularly on Munch’s 1908–9 series of lithographs titled 

 and on a new series of works by Dumas titled 

. Both series deal with themes of innocence, sexuality, loneliness, anxiety, and death, and each is structured around a love story. Through this book, Dumas shows us how she perceives Munch not simply as an emotional expressionist, but rather as an intelligent artist thoughtfully reflecting on human conditions in general.

Omega’s Eyes: Marlene Dumas on Edvard Munch

Portrait of Neo Rauch, 2023. Photo by Uwe Walter.

Daniel Kehlmann

One of the most influential figurative painters of his generation, Neo Rauch presents bold, new work in 

Rauch is widely celebrated for his captivating compositions that bring together figurative painting and surrealism into an entirely new kind of visual encounter. They often hint at broader narratives and histories—seemingly reconnecting with artistic traditions of realism—but they remain dreamlike and impossible to reduce to a single story. Though his art is highly refined and executed with great technical skill, Rauch himself stresses the intuitive, deeply personal nature of how he works. As the artist notes, “My process is far less a reflection than it is drawing from the sediments of my past, which occurs in an almost trance-like state.”

Eight large-scale canvases and seven smaller, more intimately scaled works continue the artist’s exploration of figuration and the ambiguous nature of meaning in visual art. In some of the larger works, the saturation of the canvas with characters, objects, and forms, all rendered at different scales and in conflicting arrangements, creates a collage-like quality—a figurative scrapbook of Rauch’s personal iconography.

The publication features a short story by German novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann, which was inspired by the paintings in this book. The fantastical text moves between present-day New York and an unknown time of enchanted forests, knights, and witches, exploring the many layers found in Rauch’s canvases. Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong in 2019, 

Neo Rauch: PROPAGANDA (Bilingual)

Claire Messud

Marlene Dumas’s works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery.

 documents a selection of paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture.

Alongside these paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem 

 is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

Laila Pedro

Lying deep within the urban metropolis of Hong Kong, Happy Valley is one of the most iconic racecourses in the world. It is also the chief source of inspiration for a new body of work by American artist Marcel Dzama.

Jockeys ride through waves and cathedrals, Chinese symbols pulled from racing paraphernalia adorn the edges of paper, and bats swoop, hunting for prey. Dzama’s distinct visions of the racetrack come alive through a series of large-scale paintings and drawings, transposing imagery from his prolific oeuvre into this adrenaline-filled sporting arena. His new works reflect on the culture of horseracing and how the track has become not only a symbol of sport, but also of commerce, class, and wealth.

The publication includes a conversation between Dzama and Laila Pedro. Published on the occasion of his solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong in 2019, 

Marcel Dzama: Crossing the Line (Bilingual)

Luc Tuymans in his studio, 2022. Photo by Otman Q

Eva Meyer-Hermann

Over the course of four decades, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has created his own distinctive vernacular, a new visual vocabulary. The second volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly two hundred works, including some of his most iconic canvases.

Between the years 1995 and 2006, Tuymans’s work trended toward ideas of national and collective memory. In 1996, the artist created a group of ten paintings entitled 

, for which he transformed familiar images of American life, such as Mount Rushmore, baseball caps, and the United States flag, into unsettling visions, addressing the country’s perceived vulnerability, both physical and psychological, following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Paintings from 

, his seminal body of work that was first shown at David Zwirner, New York, in 2000, after which he expanded the series for his presentation for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, depict imagery derived from the fraught history of Belgian colonial rule of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also included is one of Tuymans’s best-known paintings, 

 (2005), a powerful yet seemingly vulnerable portrayal of Condoleezza Rice, which conjures the long history of racial and sexual prejudice in the United States, not as something that has been overcome, but as an active force shaping our reality.

This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1995–2006

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 2

Foreword by Frances Morris. Introduction by Mark Godfrey and Christine Macel. Texts by Monika Bayer-Wermuth, Christine Macel, Martin Prinzhorn, and Mark Godfrey

An anarchic free spirit, self-taught until the age of thirty, Franz West remained in the shadows of the Viennese art scene for nearly fifteen years before becoming known in the international art world in the 1980s. Today he is regarded as a pivotal figure of contemporary art, whose work continues to inspire younger artists. West's output ranged from lumpy papier mâché objects to installations of divans for viewers to lounge on, from painted collages to outdoor sculptures shaped like intestines and turds. It was at once popular and esoteric, active and contemplative, corporeal and intellectual, philosophical and playful.

West produced thousands of works over forty years, and this fully illustrated catalogue provides a remarkable picture of the artist's exceptionally rich career. Further insight into West's practice is provided through essays by Mark Godfrey, Christine Macel and Martin Prinzhorn, an illustrated chronology, and some thirty previously unpublished testimonies from close associates and friends of the artist, from Kasper König to Bice Curiger and Sarah Lucas.

Franz West (Tate)

Installation view of Carol Bove at the Met, New York, 2022.

Johanna Burton

Interview with the artist by Johanna Burton

 presents new work by “sculpture’s woman of steel,” as coined by Randy Kennedy in 

. Her new sculptures expand on her investigations of materiality and form.

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. To create these lyrical and abstract assemblages, Bove pairs fabricated tubing that has been crushed and shaped at her studio with 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.

Bove’s new works are smaller in scale and elaborate on the “collage sculptures,” with more complex forms that twist, fold, and bend into postures that belie their material construction. She manipulates steel to varying degrees, rendering gentle folds in some, and extreme, almost anthropomorphic contortions in others. Their contrasting textures—matte, glossy, or rough—create a further sense of visual play, heightening the surface tension throughout.

This publication features a new interview with the artist by Johanna Burton. Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, 

Carol Bove: Ten Hours (Bilingual)

14.08.041_mama-mummy-and-mamma-predecessors-2_splash_1

Portrait of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo by Stefan Ruiz

Siddhartha Mitter

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s colorful collage-paintings lay bare the complexities of the African and diasporic experience

Nigerian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby's figurative paintings at first appear to be paintings of quotidian indoor scenes inspired by the artist's personal photographs of friends and family in Nigeria. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that large segments of these paintings are composed of collages, themselves created from personal photos and images taken from Nigerian magazines.

This richly textured appearance conveys the complexities of the African and diasporic experiences of Akunyili Crosby and of the people whose likenesses she captures in her paintings. In her series 

, Akunyili Crosby paints Nigerian children as they appear in everyday life, posing in a classroom or standing pajama-clad next to the TV. This book features full-color reproductions of the paintings with detail shots that allow the reader to see the collage work up close, as well as an introductory essay by the well-known art writer Siddhartha Mitter.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones

An installation view of an exhibition titled Andra Ursuta: Void Fill at David Zwirner, Paris, in 2021.

Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Ali Subotnick.

Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

Andra Ursuta: 2000 Words

This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works from the vital early years of his career

Credited with a key role in the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) continues to produce subtle, and at times unsettling, works that engage with history, technology, and everyday life. This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works that were vital to his artistic development. 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. Also dating from this period are many of his seminal canvases, along with ten poignant portraits of the ailing human body and the enigmatic series Superstition that comprised his first works exhibited in the United States.

The catalogue features brilliant new photography of each of the paintings and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation shots of the works in this volume. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1972–1994

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 1

A detail from a painting by Katherine Bernhardt, titled Escape from New York, dated 2020.

Vivid paintings of Swatch watches from the collection of Katherine Bernhardt

New York painter Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975) began collecting Swatch watches as a teenager in suburban Saint Louis. Obsessed by their shapes, variety of graphics and their air of pop sophistication, they became a constant in Bernhardt's visual life. She has completed numerous paintings of Swatches over the last decade, and this volume, published on the occasion of her Swatch-focused exhibition in August 2017 at Karma, pictures her original Swatch collection, kept for all these years, as well as a generous selection of her Swatch-themed paintings.

Katherine Bernhardt: Swatches

This book collects drawings, supplemented by her own photographs, by artist Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975), of midcentury modern houses in the Hamptons, Fire Island and Martha's Vineyard. Bernhardt spent the summer of 2017 living at Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton. She and her son embarked on bike rides around the area, and Bernhardt became fascinated by, as she writes, "huge and small wonderful wood and glass masterpieces, some with crazy window shapes, some A-frames, some with concrete, all interesting designs ... I started making fast black ink sumi-e-like drawings of the houses, breaking down the houses to their basic forms of line." Featuring an introductory text by the artist and a historical overview by David Sokol of architecture in the Hamptons, 

 offers a unique, personal account of the forms and structures of modernist vacation homes.

Katherine Bernhardt: Houses

An installation by Huma Bhabha, titled We Come in Peace, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dated 2017.

Text by Shanay Jhaveri, Ed Halter and Sheena Wagstaff

A compact volume that illuminates the work of Huma Bhabha and chronicles her piece for the 2018 Met Roof Garden commission.

Often described as “post apocalyptic,” the work of Pakistani sculptor Huma Bhabha (b. 1962) responds to the violence and turmoil in the world around her through depictions of anthropomorphic figures that often appear to be dismembered, melted, or dissected. This compact volume, accompanying a site-specific installation at the Metropolitan Museum’s Roof Garden, features an interview with the artist that provides new insight into her diverse influences. Essays discuss the impact of cinema and science fiction on Bhabha’s sculpture, explore art historical connections, and illuminate the artist’s process and oeuvre over the past 20 years. Like the installation, this book—the sixth in a series devoted to the Met’s Roof Garden Commissions—connects Bhabha’s contemporary practice to both art history and global current events.

Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Jenni Sorkin

In a unique style that is both sensory and utopian, Yayoi Kusama’s work possesses a highly personal character, yet one that has connected profoundly with large audiences around the globe. Throughout her career she has been able to break down traditional barriers between work, artist, and spectator.

Kusama’s work—which spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures—has transcended some of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century, including pop art and minimalism. Conveying extraordinary vitality and passion, her work seems to encompass an autobiographic, even confessional dimension. As stated by Roberta Smith in 

, “These paintings form a great big infinity room of their own, but one in which each part is also an autonomous work of art, its own piece of wobbly, handwrought infinity. You may not want to know these paintings Ms. Kusama has made, but in the moment their vitality is infectious. It is the vitality of an artist who lives to work, whose work keeps her alive.”

 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 

series, new large-scale flower sculptures, a polka-dotted environment, and two 

. The monograph includes new scholarship on the artist by Jenni Sorkin, as well as a special foldout poster.

Yayoi Kusama: Festival of Life

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Preface by Bridget Oetker and Isabel Podeschwa. Introduction by Wolfgang Tillmans. Contributions by Philipp Hübl, Jonas Kaplan, Joe Keohane, and Michael Seemann. Interviews with Lionel Barber, Carolin Emcke, Sigmar Gabriel, Bianca Klose, Stephan Lewandowsky, Brendan Nyhan, and Wolfgang Schäuble by Wolfgang Tillmans


 is the title of this year’s edition of Sternberg Press's Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 2000s Tillmans has been working on 

, a series of works concerned with absolute claims of truth in social and political contexts.

Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and psychological findings such as the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?

Tillmans interviewed scientists, politicians, journalists, and social workers, highlighting the issues at stake from various angles. The publication also contains analytic texts and studies that shed further light on what happens in our brain, ethics, and online behavior when we are confronted with statements that oppose our political beliefs. Tillmans associated these texts with his own images as well as visual material found in print and online. While designing this year’s Jahresring, he has created photocopy works using the four-color scan process on a machine from the 1990s—an early digital collage technique that resonates with the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in today.

Jahresring 64

Wolfgang Tillmans: What Is Different?

Allie Biswas

Interview with the artist by Allie Biswas

Presenting recent developments in Wolfgang Tillmans’s portraiture and still lifes, 

 features a broad selection of new and recent works that respond to their surroundings while at the same time embodying a self-contained environment.

Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced a younger generation more than Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium, and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.

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. An aerial view of the Sahara desert displays almost infinite detail while being monochromatic and near-abstract in appearance. In line with Tillmans’s interest in exhibitions as amplifiers of a particular, underlying perspective, each of the works engages in an intricate system of relationships between its aesthetic elements, subject, and institutional setting. Seen together, they implicate the viewer as an active part of the dialogue. The 2016 interview with author Allie Biswas of 

 has been edited and expanded by the artist for this catalogue.

Wolfgang Tillmans: DZHK Book 2018

James Rondeau

Kate Nesin

Juliane Rebentisch

Texts by James Rondeau, Kate Nesin, and Juliane Rebentisch.

This publication examines both the art-historical framework of Tomma Abts’s painting as well as its deep philosophical and psychological dimensions.

With a rigorous approach and self-imposed limitations to both scale and composition, Tomma Abts (b. 1967) has reinvigorated painterly abstraction and its relevance within contemporary art. Using a fixed canvas size and a vertical format, Abts deploys basic formal elements such as arcs, circles, planes, and stripes to create powerful works that are at once subtle and eccentric. This extraordinary book, designed in collaboration with the artist herself, is a substantial and deeply insightful treatment of her career to date and features sixty works made over the past decade. Essays not only contextualize Abts’s work within an art-historical framework of methods, process, and style, but also examine her paintings’ philosophical and psychological dimensions and their embodiment of a creative process that transcends the specifics of any particular work.

Tomma Abts

Vernon Lee

Dylan Kenny

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 

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.

The Psychology of an Art Writer

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David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.