Denise Scott Brown

Elizabeth Schambelan

By Denise Scott Brown. Introduction by Elizabeth Schambelan



This vibrant collection of essays by the iconic architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown captures the visionary mind that has transformed our understanding of contemporary aesthetics, semiotics, and experience.

Denise Scott Brown is a preeminent figure in twentieth-century architecture and urban planning, but her influence extends far beyond these fields. Her groundbreaking, deeply humanist approach to design considers the built environment as a shared, lived-in space, shaped by cultural, social, and historical structures and forces. She is widely known for her seminal 1972 text 

, coauthored with her partner, Robert Venturi, which gave form to knowledge that fundamentally changed how we understand the spaces we inhabit. Scott Brown’s writing, like her architecture, is eclectic, witty, and compelling, drawing upon theory and her own life experiences to reorient our attention toward the needs of everyday people.

This new addition to David Zwirner Books’s 

 series brings together approximately fifteen essays by Scott Brown that exemplify her spirit of inquiry. Together, they offer us an invitation to really see and think—and

then to act through writing, designing, and building. An introduction by Elizabeth Schambelan situates these essays within Scott Brown’s extraordinary career and underscores their continued relevance today as we seek to both determine and grasp the unfolding new worlds around us.

The first title in the 

 series to focus on the built environment, this volume expands the series’ driving investigation into reading the social, cultural, and architectural landscapes around us with renewed attention.

Essays on Architecture and Planning

Forms, Forces, Functions

A painting by On Kawara, titled MAY 11, 1967, dated 1967.

On Kawara, One Million Years (Past), 1970-1971, Page 2001

Anne Wheeler

 presents complete facsimiles of the first five journals that the artist made alongside his renowned 

series, offering an unprecedented view into the method and complexity behind the artist’s Date Paintings.

 series—also known as the Date Paintings—in 1966. Through a disciplined and structured approach, Kawara transformed the ordinary fact of a date into a profound message, addressing not only the passage of time but the nature of consciousness itself. The artist meticulously documented the full series in corresponding Journals assembled at the close of each year, the first five of which are reproduced for the first time as full facsimiles in 

The artist’s Journals function as both an archive of and a companion to the Date Paintings. They document the color and format of each painting, log corresponding subtitles, and include photography that Kawara chose to represent that year’s production. They reveal the daily decisions and systems that shaped the series from its inception. Together, the Journals provide singular insight into one of the most influential bodies of work in conceptual art.

Published on the occasion of a 2027 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, 

 includes an introduction by Anne Wheeler, from the artist’s One Million Years Foundation, which situates the Journals within the broader significance of the 

series. This publication reveals a rarely seen dimension of this acclaimed body of work, foregrounding the artist’s intricate and exacting process.

1966–1970

On Kawara: Journals

Lucas Arruda at the print shop René Tazé, Paris, 2023. Photo by Matthew Avignone

Nicolas Gausserand

Christine Smallwood

Texts by Nicolas Gausserand and Christine Smallwood 

Celebrating Lucas Arruda’s landmark exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, this captivating catalogue showcases his luminous landscapes in the compelling context of the museum’s collection.



Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda creates landscapes that hover between the real and the imagined. For more than fifteen years, his ongoing 

 series of intimate, small-format paintings has explored light as a central, shaping force. “It is light that guides my painting,” Arruda explains, “creating intensity and giving rise to spaces that are neither abstract nor figurative.” While his focus on atmosphere and perception recalls impressionist painters, Arruda does not work from plein air studies or photographs. Instead, his images emerge from memory and imagination—interior visions that feel both timeless and deeply personal.

This publication accompanies 

, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in France, which was held at the Musée d’Orsay in 2025. For the exhibition, Arruda selected works by nineteenth-century masters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley to appear alongside his own, opening a dialogue across centuries. An essay by the curator Nicolas Gausserand illuminates these connections, tracing the affinities between Arruda’s contemporary practice and the impressionist legacy. The writer Christine Smallwood explores in a new essay how light figures in Arruda’s landscapes to create a sense of timelessness that has a magnetic effect on viewers. 

Lucas Arruda: Qu'importe le paysage

Elaine Scarry

ekphrasis

Acclaimed theorist and scholar Elaine Scarry uncovers profound connections between color and our intuitions about mind, spirit, and the immortal through readings of works by Proust, Woolf, and Murasaki, offering fresh insights into the interplay between language and the mysterious image-making power of the mind.

How do writers summon color into being—not only in the worlds they depict, but in the minds of their readers? Unlike the visual arts, literature has no physical medium; its images instead emerge on the reader’s mental retina. In this new commission from David Zwirner Books, Elaine Scarry blends literary analysis with contemporary neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy to investigate this phenomenon of imagining color.

Through close readings of texts by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Lady Murasaki, and the medieval Pearl poet, Scarry explores how the brain conjures hues and sensations without the eye encountering actual pigment or light. Drawing from classic experiments on imagination, Scarry reveals the surprising ways literature triggers quasi-physical responses, as words transform into vivid, sensorial experiences.

 series’ exploration of how language gives form to visual experience, showing that literary description can summon colors and images in the mind’s eye.

Imagining Color: Elaine Scarry, front cover

Imagining Color

Yu Nishimura. Photo by Takashi Homma for MARFA

Contributions by Ryoko Sekiguchi, Estelle Zhong Mengual, and Elsa Coustou



Published to coincide with Yu Nishimura’s exhibition 

this monograph explores the sensitive world of the artist’s paintings.

 highlights the artist’s explorations of the landscape—a space inhabited by presences and often bordered by the sea. Whether viewed from a train window or hidden by trees or houses, the sea has been a constant presence in Nishimura’s life since his childhood. Conceived as a meditative stroll along the seashore, brings together a body of work comprising fifty artworks, ranging from drawings to large-scale paintings, created over the last ten years. In his works, as in our memory, the imaginary merges with reality in enigmatic representations in which the locations permeate and haunt the figures.

The book also includes photographs and personal documents, as well as previously unpublished contributions by Ryoko Sekiguchi, Estelle Zhong Mengual, and Elsa Coustou, the exhibition’s curator.

Yu Nishimura: Towards a Sea

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

Contributions by Shanay Jhaveri and Émilie Bouvard. Conversations with Huma Bhabha, Mona Hatoum, and Lynda Benglis. 

Published to accompany the Encounters exhibition series held at the Barbican, London that positioned historic sculptures by Alberto Giacometti with new works by contemporary artists

One of the most significant European sculptors of the 20th century, Giacometti is known for his distinctive, elongated sculptures which experiment with the human form. Responding to the pain and devastation caused by the Second World War, his works proposed a new perspective on humanity and the collective psyche. Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti, this year-long series launched in May 2025 with an exhibition of works by Huma Bhabha, followed by Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026. Their artworks resonate with and respond to Giacometti’s sculptures, opening up new intergenerational dialogues through the timeless themes of death, fragmentation, the domestic, memory, trauma, the erotic, horror and humour. This is the first time that their sculptures will be seen alongside Giacometti’s works.

This publication features new essays by exhibition curators Shanay Jhaveri (Head of Visual Arts, Barbican) and Émilie Bouvard (Director of Collections and Scientific Programme, Fondation Giacometti) and is richly illustrated with images of the exhibitions. Artist conversations with Huma Bhabha, Mona Hatoum, and Lynda Benglis offer new insight into each artist's practice and their particular relationships to the work of Alberto Giacometti. This volume contains three-hole sewn paperbacks in a slipcase. 

Encounters: Giacometti

Edited by Mara Hoberman. Contributions by Kamrooz Aram, Amélie Bertrand, Stéphane Bordarier, Robert Longo, Frédérique Lucien, Carmen Neely, Joanne Robertson, Megan Rooney, and Jongsuk Yoon

Joan Mitchell, one of the most important artists of the post-war period, was also a uniquely transatlantic figure. From the 1950s onward, as Mitchell moved back and forth between the United States and France, her work—and the discourse surrounding it—developed across two continents, two cultures, and two languages. Invited by Mara Hoberman, nine artists based on either side of the Atlantic reflect on Mitchell’s life, work, and enduring impact.

Joan Mitchell: Transatlantique

A new perspective on renowned twentieth-century artist Paul Klee, revealing his enduring creativity in the face of darkness by foregrounding his lesser-known late work



Celebrated for his colorful, fantastical paintings, Paul Klee (1879–1940), a pioneer of modernism and expressionism, is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Though he is remembered for the chromatic style of his most famous works, Klee’s late work reflects a dark and dramatic transformation, providing insight into the artist’s psychological landscape.

Forced to flee Nazi persecution in 1933, Klee faced final years that were marked by exile, illness, and political upheaval. 

 takes the unsettling last decade of Klee’s life as its subject, arguing that he accepted his vulnerability as a strength—one that enabled him to develop a personal rebuff of fascism through a lexicon of abstraction. With 120 illustrations highlighting works from throughout Klee’s career, this catalog traces the evolution of his artistic practice and frames his late work in the context of his oeuvre. Essays by leading scholars and curators reexamine Klee’s legacy and the importance of his late masterpieces as an artistic defiance against oppression.

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds

A painting by Michael Armitage, titled Enasoit, dated 2019.

Portrait of Michael Armitage, 2021. Photo by Tom Jamieson

Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Texts by Manthia Diawara, Jean-Marie Gallais, Salman Rushdie, and Ocean Vuong. Conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Michael Armitage

"Michael Armitage responds to his time, to our time, using all the vocabulary, all the arsenal of art. He paints on

canvas, made from tree bark, and makes his fragility an asset, suggesting that his human subjects can also transform their own into strength, and that what can work this magic is beauty." — Salman Rushdie

 is the publication that accompanies the major exhibition of the same name that Pinault Collection dedicates to the British painter Michael Armitage in the exhibition spaces of Palazzo Grassi in Venice (from March 29, 2026 to January 10, 2027).

Armitage, born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1984, is a leading figure in the new international figurative painting. His research combines references to the European pictorial tradition with elements of East African visual culture, creating images of great narrative force and remarkable visual impact thanks to an extraordinary and highly personal use of color.

The volume offers an in-depth overview of his production, which now covers more than a decade, presenting, through a wide selection of reproductions of the works on display, scenes suspended between reality and imagination that address themes such as cultural identity and collective memory, politics and social transformations, myths, traditions, and popular narratives.

Critical texts and testimonies by Manthia Diawara, Jean-Marie Gallais, Salman Rushdie and Ocean Vuong join a long and recent interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with the artist and take shape with the extraordinary graphic and cartotechnical project of Irma Boom Office.

Michael Armitage: The Promise of Change

The first major biography on Anni Albers traces the complex personality and influential artistic career of the groundbreaking modern artist



Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. As a textile designer, weaver, writer, and graphic artist, she inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wall hangings, and took the processes of printmaking into uncharted territory. This intimate biography draws on personal conversations with Albers from the 1970s up until Albers’s death and on unprecedented archival research to tell a fresh and full story of Albers’s life and the development of her unique and influential artistic vision.

Capturing Albers’s extraordinary perspective about the world around her, whether the milieu she was observing was the wealthy bourgeois Berlin of her childhood or the Mexican villages where she came to feel remarkably at home, Nicholas Fox Weber brings the artist’s pithy wit and imaginative mind to life. Weber presents a riveting narrative that follows Albers’s trajectory from her time at the Bauhaus and at Black Mountain College to her later years in Connecticut. He considers her complex relationship with her world-renowned husband, Josef Albers, as well as her encounters with luminaries such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Louise Nevelson. He also describes her torturous, late-life obsession with film star Maximilian Schell, thirty-one years her junior. Weber foregrounds Albers’s perpetual curiosity, originality, and humor, as well as her novelistic sense of the world around her.

Book cover of Anni Albers: A Life by Nicholas Fox Weber

Anni Albers: A Life

Contributions by Frances Morris, Katharine Stout, and Jennifer Higgie 

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, from February 28 to April 19, 2026, this book brings together leading authorities on Rose Wylie's work and many of her distinct images.

Rose Wylie OBE RA lives and works in Kent. She paints from memory, frequently taking her imagery from mass media. Her large works on unstretched, unprimed canvas appear simple at first glance, but close inspection reveals them to be subtle meditations on the nature of visual representation. She regularly brings together apparently disparate images, creating visual rhymes and resonances that coalesce into unified compositions.

This new book, the catalogue of a large-scale exhibition at the Royal Academy, brings together leading authorities on Wylie’s work and a host of her unmistakable imagery.

Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Contributions by Emanuele Coccia, Leontine Coelewij, Stephan Diederich, SooJin Lee, Katie Mack, Stefano Mancuso, Ralph McCarthy, Mouna Mekouar, Charlotte Sarrazin, Agata Marta Soccini, and Helen Westgeest

The definitive catalog offering an in-depth exploration of Yayoi Kusama's seven-decade career, including rare early works and new productions

This catalog accompanies the Fondation Beyeler's major autumn 2025 exhibition dedicated to the celebrated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929). As the first retrospective of Kusama's work in Switzerland, this landmark publication offers a comprehensive exploration of her more than seven-decade career. Developed in close collaboration with the artist and her studio, the catalog presents an in-depth look at Kusama's diverse body of work, from her early creations―some never before seen in Europe―to her most iconic pieces, as well as new productions and one of her renowned Infinity Mirror rooms. Richly illustrated, the catalog examines Kusama's signature artistic language, characterized by obsessive repetition and boundless mirrored spaces that transport viewers into infinite realms. It serves as an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand Kusama's enduring impact on contemporary art.

Cover of the book Yayoi Kusama published by fondation beyeler in 2025

Yayoi Kusama

t presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie. She has won global recognition with her unique artistic practice and wide range of themes. Wylie’s large-format paintings are a mixture of figurative representation, abstraction and stories in pictures. Expressive, direct and filled with subversive humour, they bear witness to the artist’s engagement with pop culture, literature, history, and personal experiences. Wylie’s artistic language is deliberately simple, and recalls the aesthetic of Bad Painting and Post-Pop.

With works from the last thirty years, the book provides an insight into the untamed oeuvre of an artist who overcomes conventional boundaries and occupies a unique place in the contemporary art scene. Individual works are also being painted specially for the exhibition in Bern, and shown to the public for the first time, just as Juergen Teller’s photographs, in their inimitable way, introduce us to the artists’ world in her different way.

Rose Wylie: Flick and Float

Contributions by Alexis Vaillant and Fabrice Hergott. Conversation between the artist and Jonas Wood

The eponymous monograph of Japanese artist Yu Nishimura is the first English-language publication to survey the artist’s works from 2016 to 2024, featuring his lucid figuration to scenic landscapes



The book includes Nishimura’s own photographs which inspired his paintings, two texts by the writers Alexis Vaillant and Fabrice Hergott and a conversation with the artist Jonas Wood.

Yu Nishimura

Texts by Douglas Fogle and Marlene Dumas.

This catalog accompanies the exhibition "Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues" at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, featuring over 40 paintings and works of paper, combined with over 30 antiquities from the museum’s collection. Grouped into categories—family, portrait, erotic figure, fragmented body, and portraits of sculptures—Dumas’s works enter into a timeless dialogue with the abstracted human forms of the Cycladic figurines created by unknown artists several millennia ago. 

As the artist states on the first page: "This is a book for all time; from being born, being young, being attractive and seductive, being betrayed and attacked, to being old and trying not to die."

Cover of a book titled Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues at the Cycladic, published by Roma Publications in 2025.

Marlene Dumas: Cycladic Blues at the Cycladic

The first R. Crumb comic book in 23 years! 

The seminal cartoonist who single-handedly invented the alternative comics format of the one-person anthology in 1967 with 

 returns at age 81, still raging at the world and himself, still drawing like a master, and still funny... mostly. In his latest comics excursion, Crumb dives down internet and newspaper rabbit-holes, and comes up asking questions. Why don't we know the real background of deep state careerists? And is Crumb himself just as paranoid as everyone else tells him he is? Or is that just what THEY want you to think?

Mixing memoir, essay, polemic, neurosis, and conspiracy across 12 short comics—including the final "Dirty Laundry" story, drawn by Crumb with a script written with Aline Kominsky-Crumb before her death in 2022— 

 shows there's still plenty of life in both the artist and the classic underground comics format.

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia

This six-panel cotton hat features a custom embroidered design by R. Crumb for the Los Angeles gallery location of David Zwirner. 

David Zwirner Los Angeles Hat

An installation view of the exhibition, Suzan Frecon: recent paintings, oil and water, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2022.

Marcella Durand

 pairs poems by Marcella Durand with reproductions of paintings on paper by Suzan Frecon. The book marks the first collaboration between Frecon and Durand, who are mother and daughter, and a continuing connection to France, as Durand is a dual citizen and translator. A selection of Frecon’s works on paper featured in the publication will be included as part of the 2025 exhibition 

 in the David Zwirner Gallery in Paris. These “brushwork” pieces include small-scale experiments by Frecon with brush strokes and haematite pigments. 

Suzan Frecon: The Light Factory

Sigmar Polke, Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982

 is the catalogue for the exhibition devoted to Sigmar Polke at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. Bice Curiger, curator of the exhibition and a specialist in Polke’s work, is editing the book. It gathers paintings, photographs, and films plus graphic art from 1960 to 2009 to illustrate the multifaceted quality of the artist’s output, which is informed by astute observations and powerful creative choices that reflect the artist’s sense of irony and love of experimentation. One focus of the selection of works is on the political dimension of Polke’s oeuvre; he was an exacting analyst of the world around him and commented critically on politics, art, and history.

The extensive essay section includes the main contribution by Bice Curiger, and texts by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, Nina Pohl, Kathy Halbreich, Friedrich W. Heubach, Maria Stavrinaki, Petra Lange-Berndt and Dietmar Rübel. Poems by Thomas Kling and statements by artists Anne Imhof, Alvaro Barrington, Michael Krebber, Helen Marten, Trajal Harrell, and Laura Owens provide further insight into Polke’s work.

English/German bilingual edition

Sigmar Polke: Beneath the Cobblestones, the Earth (English/German edition)

Sasha Gordon, 2024. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Text by Kathy Huang. Contributions by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Genny Lim, Delia Cai, Kevin Kwan, and Fariha Róisín

The first book to highlight Asian diasporic women and nonbinary artists engaged with figurative painting, sculpture, and drawing—featuring the work of Sasha Gordon.



Genny Lim’s poem “Wonder Woman” follows a narrator who observes the everyday lives of Asian women—across generations, countries, and socioeconomic backgrounds—wondering if their experiences reflect her own. The poem centers Asian women as its protagonists and asks what commonalities exist between them.

Often underrepresented in museum collections and important exhibitions, Asian diasporic women and nonbinary artists are now receiving recognition; this book expands on two landmark shows of figurative art curated by Kathy Huang, organized in response to increasing anti-Asian racism and violence during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The forty featured artists, each represented with four or more works and a personal statement, subvert stereotypes and assert their identities in places where they have historically been marginalized. While some featured artists explore identity through self-portraiture, others depict the heroines in their lives, offering works that highlight family, community, and history. Several of the works address colonial and patriarchal structures in the West, legends, and myths. With essays, paintings, sculptures, and drawings created within the last four years, this book is a current, open-ended collection of contemporary Asian diasporic experiences.

Wonder Women: Art of the Asian Diaspora

Empress of Night

Marcel Dzama

1-Up

 at David Zwirner Los  Angeles (June 28–August 8). This richly illustrated, limited-edition zine features close‑up details of new and recent works—including ink, pearlescent-ink, watercolor, and graphite pieces—set among dense, dreamlike nightscapes.

With references to Francisco Goya and surrealist poet Federico García Lorca, among others, the zine explores parallels between historical periods of turmoil and our present moment, and touches on themes of ecological fragility and authoritarianism. With recurring figures like animals, dancing jesters, and celestial motifs, 

 captures Dzama’s nocturnal imagination and allegorical storytelling, offering a poetic and timely reflection of hope amid unrest.

Marcel Dzama: Empress of Night

Joan Mitchell and Her Dogs, Norma Editions, 2025



From Joan Mitchell's very first dog, to Marion, Madeleine and Prunelle, all of them cherished companions in her life and work. Joan Mitchell and her dogs: a love story.



Joan Mitchell, an extraordinary figure in 20th-century art, remains one of the most celebrated painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Born in 1925, in Chicago, Illinois, she grew to redefine abstraction, blending emotional intensity with lyrical beauty. Her work, characterized by dynamic brushstrokes, vivid colors, and profound emotional depth, established her as a towering presence in a predominantly male art world.

Joan Mitchell had 13 dogs. Georges du Soleil, a black poodle, was one of Joan Mitchell's beloved canine companions. Known for her deep affection for animals, Mitchell treasured Georges as a constant presence in her life during her years in France. Georges, like her other pets, was more than just a companion; he was part of the vibrant, dynamic environment that nourished her creativity and her ability to channel emotion into her art.



“Dogs are objects of love (I suppose people could be? Sometimes)”

 wrote Joan Mitchell.

From her first dog, the adored Georges du Soleil, to Skye Terriers Idée, Isabelle, and Ibertelle (“Bertie”), Brittany Spaniel Patou, German Shepherds Iva, Marion, and Madeleine, and not forgetting Prunelle and Belle-Bête; all of them cherished companions in her life and work, all of them celebrated here. Joan Mitchell and her dogs: a love story.

Joan Mitchell and Her Dogs

David Zwirner Books: Fall 2025, David Zwirner Books, 2025

Huma Bhabha: Welcome . . . to the one who came

Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky: Dreams of the Future

David Zwirner Books: Fall 2025

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

Edited by Dennis Brzek and Hilke Wagner. Conversation between Dennis Brzek, Hilke Wagner, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Very few artists mirror our recent past as profoundly as Wolfgang Tillmans in their work. On the occasion of his exhibition "Weltraum" at the Albertinum in Dresden, Tillmans has created a unique artist's book that places his four decades of artistic practice in a thoughtprovoking dialogue with the past and present of East and West Germany. 

 intertwines excerpts from a 1987 Dresden inventory catalogue with Tillmans' 2003 catalogue "If one thing matters, everything matters" for Tate Britain, in which he devised a speculative catalogue raisonné of his early work. The resurgence of these two out-of-print titles is combined with a conversation in which Tillmans reflects on his artistic beginnings and analyses their aesthetic and social implications today.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Things Matter

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