Paul Morris

This special edition with an artist-signed bookplate is available in a limited run of 400 copies.

One of America’s most celebrated cartoonists, Robert Crumb helped define cartoon and punk subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s with comic strips like 

. The open sexuality of his work, paired with frequent self-deprecation and a free, almost stream-of-consciousness style, have made Crumb into a global voice and a renowned contemporary artist.

Originally published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1996, 

 is at once a satirical take on aesthetics and a continued exploration of Crumb’s subversion of sexuality and mainstream values. Drawings of women in positions ranging from lascivious to modest or mid-sport are accompanied by quotations, many of which are from artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Harvey Kurtzman. Mining his own obsessions and fantasies, Crumb reimagines the history of art, challenging notions of beauty, along with society’s mores and expectations of propriety around the female form. The second volume of 

, published in 2003, expanded on the first, adding all new drawings (also of women) and quotations, likewise taken from the history of art and aesthetics. The effect of both volumes is undeniably destabilizing. The images appeal to a purely erotic sensibility, which in turn is undercut by the inclusion of highfalutin and frequently philosophical prose. The images drag philosophy back down to earth, while the writing challenges the pure eroticism of Crumb’s drawings.

 is released for the first time as part of 

Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb. 

It is published on the occasion of Crumb's exhibition at David Zwirner, London, which debuts the new work he created for the magazine’s third issue. Presenting all three volumes in one book, 

 is arranged chronologically and guides the reader through the twenty-year history of Crumb’s magazine, from the earliest images in the 1990s to the most recent drawings completed in 2016. Paul Morris, longtime gallerist and supporter of Crumb’s practice, writes an introduction that contextualizes this body of work and the artist’s career as a whole. This beautiful edition, with a cover specially designed by Crumb for its release, makes the initial two issues available for the first time in over ten years, and presents the new and previously unpublished material from the third. For seasoned supporters and novices alike, 

Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb

 is a wonderful window into Crumb’s world of bodies and ideas, art and beauty.

Numbers 1, 2 & 3

Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb (limited edition)

Text by Anette Gehrig. Contributions by Michael Freund, Sébastien Gokalp, Paul Morris, and Joost Swarte

The USA’s Aline Kominsky-Crumb (b. 1948) and Robert Crumb (b. 1943) are an odd couple—in life, as well as in art. He is a celebrated underground artist and she is a pioneer of the autobiographical comic. Since 1972, they have been collaboratively writing and drawing the autobiographical relationship-and-family comic strip 

, in which the societal upheavals of the 1970s, the differences between man and woman, and a handful of substantial neuroses play leading roles: a side-splitting drama, unique in the world of comics, with a wealth of punch lines. The publication 

Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb. Drawn Together

 coincides with the exhibition of the same name and contains selected episodes from 

, including the stories that have never been published in Europe before, supplemented with solo works by Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Robert Crumb, as well as photographs and articles on the life and works of these artists.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn Together

Text by Bob Nickas, Katy Siegel, Heidi Zuckerman

German artist Tomma Abts (born 1967) creates her paintings and drawings using a rigorous process that combines the rational with the intuitive. Starting with no external source material and no preconceived idea of the final result, Abts makes complex abstract compositions that ultimately take as their subject the process of their own creation. This publication accompanies her exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, which is the first to survey the artist's extensive drawing practice. It features 41 works from 1996 to the present—many never before exhibited—and includes new works created specifically for the exhibition. The catalogue also features essays by Bob Nickas, Katy Siegel and Heidi Zuckerman.

Tomma Abts: Mainly Drawings

Limning a dizzying array of topics with his distinctive combinations of image and text, Raymond Pettibon has created a vocabulary of characters and symbols that reappear consistently if enigmatically across his oeuvre, ranging from baseball players, atomic bombs, and railway trains to the cartoon Gumby. But the most poetic and revealing of Pettibon’s symbols may be the surfer, the solitary longboarder challenging a massive wave. In his surfer works, viewers ride along with a counterculture existentialist hero who perhaps is the artist’s nearest proxy.

This revised and expanded edition of Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985–2015, the first printing of which sold out almost immediately upon publication in 2014, features twenty additional works, as well as new color separations and jacket design. Nearly all the works included in this volume depict an ocean roiling with chaotic swells, accompanied by non sequiturs, quotations, and fragments of poetry in the artist’s handwriting. Organized chronologically, the publication traces Pettibon’s prolific output of his surfer series, from early small-scale monochrome India ink drawings to numerous examples from the 1990s when the artist introduced color, culminating with his recent large-scale works, some of which were executed directly on a wall. Rounding out the publication is a poetic meditation by the writer Carlo McCormick, which captures the essence of Pettibon’s surfing works: “Riddled with enigma, Raymond Pettibon’s art speaks little about himself the artist, preferring rather to address more central questions on the nature of self, but he tells us this, ‘Some things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn at all, but only surfed,’ or again, ‘All this must be either surfed or painted.’"

Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015

Helen Molesworth

Ruth Erickson

By Helen Molesworth. Contributions by Ruth Erickson

A dynamic new look at the legendary college that was a major incubator of the arts in midcentury America

In 1933, John Rice founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina as an experiment in making artistic experience central to learning. Though it operated for only 24 years, this pioneering school played a significant role in fostering avant-garde art, music, dance, and poetry, and an astonishing number of important artists taught or studied there. Among the instructors were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Karen Karnes, M. C. Richards, and Willem de Kooning, and students included Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly.

 is a singular exploration of this legendary school and of the work of the artists who spent time there. Scholars from a variety of fields contribute original essays about diverse aspects of the College—spanning everything from its farm program to the influence of Bauhaus principles—and about the people and ideas that gave it such a lasting impact. In addition, catalogue entries highlight selected works, including writings, musical compositions, visual arts, and crafts. The book’s fresh approach and rich illustration program convey the atmosphere of creativity and experimentation that was unique to Black Mountain College, and that served as an inspiration to so many. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the College and its enduring legacy.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957

Kai Hong

Kate YK Lim

Park Kyung-mee

Richard Vine

Introduction by Park Kyung-mee. Texts by Kai Hong, Kate Lim, and Richard Vine

This monograph serves as a comprehensive survey of Yun Hyong-keun's oeuvre covering forty years from his earliest surviving efforts through his very last works. This overview is accompanied by insightful critical essays by Kai Hong, Kate Lim, and richard Vine that offer diverse contemporary perspectives on the style, themes, and historical context of this remarkable artist.

Korea's Dansaekhwa movement which formed one of the most complex efforts at artistic expression in the 1970s has at long last started to attract international interest and a serious appraisal by experts outside of Asian art. Yun was a central figure in the Dansaekhwa movement who also firmly established his own artistic integrity by drawing on traditional Korean art and themes as the root for his conceptual approach and aesthetic sensibility.

Selected Works 1972–2007

Yun Hyong-keun

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Midori Yamamura

Yayoi Kusama is the most famous artist to emerge from Japan in the period following World War II. Part of a burgeoning international art scene in the early 1960s, she exhibited in New York with Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, and other Pop and Minimalist luminaries, and in Europe with the Dutch Nul and the German Zero artist groups. Known for repetitive patterns, sewn soft sculptures, naked performance, and suggestive content, Kusama’s work anticipated the politically charged feminist art of the 1970s. But Kusama and her work were soon eclipsed by a dealer-controlled art market monopoly of white male American artists. Returning to Japan in 1973, Kusama became almost as famous for her self-proclaimed mental illness and permanent residence in a psychiatric hospital as she was for her art. In this book, Midori Yamamura eschews the usual critical fascination with Kusama’s biography to consider the artist in her social and cultural milieu. By examining Kusama’s art alongside that of her peers, Yamamura offers a new perspective on Kusama’s career.

Yamamura shows that Kusama, who came of age in totalitarian wartime Japan, embraced art as an anti-conformist pursuit, seeking a subjective autonomy that resulted in the singular expression of her art. Examining Kusama’s association with European and New York art movements of the 1960s and her creation of psychedelic light-and-sound “Happenings,” Yamamura argues that Kusama and her heterogeneous peers defied and undermined various pillars of modernity during the crucial transition from the modern nation-state to global free-market capitalism.

The art market rediscovered Kusama in the 1990s, and she has since had a series of high-profile exhibitions. Recounting Kusama’s story, Yamamura offers an incisive, penetrating analysis of postwar art’s globalization as viewed from the periphery.

Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular

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

Wolfgang Tillmans

 compiles a new body of work by renowned photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968). Since the early 90s, Tillmans has redefined the genre of photography, epitomizing a new kind of subjectivity and questioning existing values and hierarchies. 

 is no exception; images of cars in a typical street view—not in a crash, or an extreme traffic jam, but simply present—pay tribute to the amount of time we spend around, or looking at, or using the vehicle.

"Cars are everywhere," the photographer says. "Their sheer number is the most crazy thing about them. They appear in our lives with excessive omnipresence. In their volume cars intrude upon public space, and the way they occupy streets and open areas is rarely challenged." This unusual artist's book takes up a subject rarely deemed worthy of representation. "Virtually wherever there are people, there are cars and they are visually intermingling in whatever we see," Tillmans points out. "We are looking at the world from a car and cars are in the foreground, the background or in between of what is in our view."

With over 100 color photographs and text by the artist himself, this new volume is an important addition to any photobook collection, and to our understanding of what it is to live in a world oversaturated with both cars and images.

Wolfgang Tillmans: The Cars

Dominic Eichler

Texts by Dominic Eichler and Wolfgang Tillmans

From the start, Wolfgang Tillmans's (born 1968) abstract photographs played a decisive role in his gentle subversion of photographic hierarchies and his seductive emphasis on the materiality of photographic objects in his presentation of them. In the past decade he has pursued this tack, making wholly non-representational photographs that explore processes of exposure. From the delicate veils of color in the 

 series, and the sculptural paper drops made of folded or rolled-up photographic paper, to the colorfully compelling works of the 

 series, the printed object itself, divorced from its reproductive function, is always the point. "For me, the abstract picture is already objective because it's a concrete object and represents itself," Tillmans says; "the paper on which the picture is printed is for me an object, there is no separating the picture from that which carries it. That's why I like to show photographs sometimes framed and sometimes not, just taped to the wall." Designed by the photographer, and with 275 color reproductions of these works, 

--now in paperback--impressively demonstrates how fruitfully Tillmans has mined this terrain.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Abstract Pictures

Philipp Kaiser

This generously illustrated book examines a series of color photographs by Los Angeles–based artist James Welling, who turned to the painter Andrew Wyeth for inspiration.

As a conceptual artist who is deeply interested in the genesis of representation, Welling began this series of photographs as an examination of Andrew Wyeth’s influence on his own work, from Welling’s earliest watercolors in the 1960s through his recent photographs. Shot on location in Pennsylvania and Maine—in the same areas where Wyeth painted throughout his life—this major series includes photographs from 2010 through 2014. In addition to including never-before-seen works from the completed Wyeth series, the book explores the mechanisms of influence of one artist upon another—even across media—ranging from subconscious borrowings to more direct appropriations. Using color photography, Welling evokes Wyeth’s aesthetic, particularly the importance of place in his work. Paying homage to Wyeth’s practice of manipulating subject matter in his seemingly realistic paintings, Welling digitally altered his photographs in subtle ways. This book provides a fascinating look at a major new series by a leading contemporary artist, and allows for fresh and insightful connections to Andrew Wyeth.

Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs

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

David Cohen

For the past four decades, Suzan Frecon has become known for abstract oil paintings and watercolors that avoid facile explanations or recognizable visual associations. Instead, compositions integrate color, surface, and light to create an abstract visual reality that she intends to exist solely on its strength as art. In a deliberative and searching process, she works toward painting that provides a complex, powerful, and inexplicable experience for the viewer. As she has stated, “The physical reality and the spiritual content of my paintings are the same.”

 documents Frecon’s third solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, held in 2015, and is the most vivid presentation to date of the artist’s engagement with natural light, the always-varying subtleties of which she integrates into how the painting is created. The focal point of the catalogue is the painstakingly reproduced color plates of fourteen recent paintings, many of which are depicted several times in various types of light and from multiple angles, allowing the reader to experience the work in a way that is more akin to seeing them in person. In addition, it features an illuminating and lively essay by art writer David Cohen, which strives to explain the complexity of viewing and experiencing Frecon’s work. Rounding out the catalogue are numerous details and installation views, atmospheric color photographs of the artist’s studio and materials, and an illustrated visual appendix showing a selection of Frecon’s reference sources for the comprised works, including insightful commentary written by the artist.

Cover of a book titled oil paintings and sun, published by David Zwirner Books in 2015.

Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and sun

Gordon Hughes

Richard Serra’s “Reversal” drawings employ two identical rectangular sheets of paper that are adjoined in a vertical or horizontal format, with the black and white areas reversing themselves top to bottom (or left to right). The area that is black on the top (or left) sheet is white on the bottom (or right) sheet, and the area that is white on the top (or left) sheet is black on the bottom (or right) sheet in a figure / ground reversal.

, designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist and printed by Steidl, is the most extensive presentation of the “Reversal” drawings to be published. The book reproduces all thirty-three drawings shown in 2014 at David Zwirner in New York, in addition to documenting this series in its entirety. The book also includes new scholarship by art historian Gordon Hughes.

Richard Serra: Vertical and Horizontal Reversals

Interview with Raymond Pettibon and Scott Campbell by Alessandro Simonetti

This book is a very intimate conversation where the two artists discuss various unexpected topics such as their respective views on art and life, as well as the memories of their common time spent in jail. It was hosted on June 5th, 2013 by Italian photographer Alessandro Simonetti who simply let the conversation run and added his B&W close ups photographs, making it an overall surprising document.

On jail, art, horse races & boloney sandwiches 

Raymond Pettibon and Scott Campbell

A detail from a painting by Oscar Murillo, titled manifestation, dated 2019.

Oscar Murillo in his studio, 2022. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Belisario Caicedo

Clara Dublanc

Oscar Murillo

Texts by Belisario Caicedo, Clara Dublanc, and Oscar Murillo

Known for his large-scale paintings, Oscar Murillo's expanding practice, which includes performance, sculpture, installation, and video, has helped define him as one of the most dynamic artists of his generation. Local in his interest in community and family, but global in his approach to art making, Murillo's creative explorations present us with some of the most pressing questions facing us today: how do communities define themselves, and how can a single individual—an artist—help facilitate communication between them and the larger world?

 is a long-term project, developed with members of his family, studio team, and collaborators around the world, that begins to offer answers to these questions through painting and drawing. In 2013, Murillo began sending squares of raw canvas to selected schools in over twenty countries around the world, with the sole requirement that they be affixed to desks and illustrated by students. The canvases would stay there for a year and then be re-collected by the artist. Within weeks of their arrival, children from places as disparate as China and Slovenia began to draw, paint, write, and communicate, creating documents of their social and educational experiences. 

 catalogues the first year of Murillo\s exploration, with intimate photographs of the participants and the projects myriad steps—the arrival of canvases to different schools, the process of wrapping desks, the students at work, and the final products. Designed by OMO Creates in close collaboration with the artist, the book not only brings together a vast amount of material now collected in the eponymous archive, with over six hundred pages of detailed spreads, but is itself an extension of the project—an ongoing catalogue that charts the creation of artworks as a communal and global endeavor.

Oscar Murillo: Frequencies

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

Marlene Dumas

Mariska Van Den Berg

Text by Marlene Dumas. Edited by Mariska Van Den Berg

From the beginning, language has played an important role in the work of Marlene Dumas. Her earliest collages make use of text, and she often writes poetical monikers or captions directly onto her drawings, such as “The Eyes of the Night Creatures” or “Miss Interpreted.” Over the last 30 years, the artist has written texts ranging from aphorisms, statements and short poetic pieces to longer analytical essays. Her writing focuses on her own work, discussing its subject matter, its politics, background and source material, as well as its critical reception and her own cultural position as an artist. “I am always ‘not from here,” she writes in one text (a poem), “even though I try to know or understand ‘what’s going on’ and what the rules are and how they keep on changing and what that means. When looking at images I’m not lost, but I’m uneasy.”

, originally published in a long out-of-print (and rare) Dutch edition in 1998 and now revised and expanded, provides a selection of her best and most representative writings from 1982–2014.

Notes and Texts 1982–2014

Marlene Dumas: Sweet Nothings

is a limited edition zine published on the occasion of the artist's exhibition at the New York Art Book Fair 2015. Printed digital offset in an edition of 250 numbered copies, this publication was composed by Dzama and includes a selection of recent collages and etchings, as well as film stills from 

Une danse des bouffons (or A jester's dance)

Marcel Dzama: Death Disco Issue 1

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

Colin Chinnery

Will Self

This book brings together the most recent work by Luc Tuymans. It will be shown in the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh in the autumn of 2015. 

 shows Tuymans’s fascination with the Scottish Enlightenment and its thinkers, who believed in the ability of humans to shape their future rationally and whose influence extended as far as the United States. Stimulated by a visit to the art collection of the University of Edinburgh, Tuymans did three small portraits of Scottish philosophers, originally painted by the eighteenth-century portrait artist Henry Raeburn. The theme of the Enlightenment is combined with menacing horror: in a monumental dark work, 

, or in the portrait of the murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa. The British writer Will Self wrote a remarkable short story for 

, and the art critic Colin Chinnery has contributed an explanatory essay.

Luc Tuymans: Birds of a Feather

A painting by Lisa Yuskavage titled Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture, dated 2018-2020

Lisa Yuskavage, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Christopher Bedford

Suzanne Hudson

Catherine Lord

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Katy Siegel

Texts by Christopher Bedford, Suzanne Hudson, Catherine Lord, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Katy Siegel

Accompanying a major exhibition, this stunning survey and important monograph highlights more than two decades worth of Lisa Yuskavage’s brilliant and controversial paintings. Internationally acclaimed American painter Lisa Yuskavage is known for her seductive yet unsettling work, in which cartoony, vulgar, angelic, young nymphs are cast within fantastical landscapes or theatrical interiors. In this dazzling monograph she presents the confrontational imagery, luscious paint, and technical virtuosity that are her signature, blurring the boundaries between high art's classic female nudes and their popular culture counterparts.

This comprehensive new volume offers a rich overview of the artist’s work with interpretive essays by leading art historians and an interview with the artist. This will be the definitive book on this important artist.

Paintings 1991–2015

Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood

Portrait of Kerry James Marshall, 2018. Photo by Jason Bell

Robert Storr

Angela Choon

Text by Robert Storr. Interview with the artist by Angela Choon

With a career spanning almost three decades, Kerry James Marshall is well known for his complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes, all of which synthesize different traditions and genres while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society. Working across various mediums, from paintings and comic-style drawings to sculptural installations, photographs, and videos, the artist conflates actual and imagined events from African-American history, integrating a range of stylistic influences to address the limited historiography of black art.

Produced on the occasion of Marshall’s first exhibition at David Zwirner in London in 2014 and designed by JNL Design in Chicago, 

 features beautiful reproductions of every painting on view in the show as well as numerous details, preparatory drawings, installation photographs, new scholarship by Robert Storr and a conversation between the artist and Angela Choon, a Senior Partner at the gallery. As suggested by the show’s title, these portraits use the etymological differences between looking and seeing as their point of departure, featuring subjects whose dissociated stares seem as defiant as they are mystifying. In keeping with his signature approach, Marshall has painted his figures in strikingly opaque black pigments, both fashioning and abstracting their presences in order to assimilate the limitations and contradictions of style, subject, and chronology inherent in art-historical narratives written from a white, Western perspective. Taken all together, the range of materials included in 

 constitutes a vibrant and comprehensive portrait of Marshall’s original and ever-evolving practice.

Kerry James Marshall: Look See

Jordan Wolfson, 2023, National Gallery of Australia. Photo by Karlee Holland. Courtesy National Gallery of Australia

Martin Germann

Esther Leslie

Aram Moshayedi

Linda Norden

Philippe Van Cauteren

Introduction by Martin Germann and Aram Moshayedi. Texts by Esther Leslie, Linda Norden, and Philippe Van Cauteren. Interview with the artist by Aram Moshayedi

This book, which sold out almost immediately upon publication, is a reprint of the catalogue produced on the occasion of Wolfson’s 2012–2013 exhibitions at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Los Angeles and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent. Entitled 

, the S.M.A.K. presentation marked the most comprehensive survey of Wolfson’s work to date. The volume’s eponymous title effectively expresses the artist’s interest in the ego and its image as well as destabilizing differences between life and imitation, reality and imagination. Anchored by full-scale color plates of Wolfson’s three animations—video stills, details, and installation views of the ambitiously conceived 

 (2012)—the book provides a critical framework for the artist’s vast and varied practice.

Images are given context by illuminating scholarship by Esther Leslie and Linda Norden, and a conversation between Aram Moshayedi and Wolfson brings their analyses to ground. Also included is a letter personally addressed to the artist by Philippe Van Cauteren. In Wolfson’s words, his work is “about reaching a place of displacement and control within the space of viewing”; this text exists as an embodiment of that ever-evolving vision, which considers the developments of digital and analogue animation as essential to the histories of modernism and modernity, and posits them as responsible for shaping and relaying the concerns of sculptural and pictorial modes of representation, and defining our relationship to both images and objects.

Jordan Wolfson: Ecce Homo / le Poseur

Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Jordan Wolfson

Gaea Woods

Text by Jordan Wolfson. Photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath and Gaea Woods

Over the past decade, Jordan Wolfson has become known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, and the technology industries to produce ambitious and enigmatic narratives. However, instead of simply appropriating found material, the artist creates his own unique content, which frequently revolves around a series of invented, animated characters.

This artist’s book is the product of close collaboration between Wolfson and the book designer Joseph Logan. Initially conceived to document the artist’s 2014 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York—his first with the gallery, debuting new sculptural work, a critically acclaimed video, and a much-discussed animatronic sculpture—the publication ultimately exists as a hybrid between an exhibition catalogue and a stand-alone expression of Wolfson’s vision. Featuring a dynamic layout and large color plates, the book is anchored by extensive photo documentation of Wolfson’s bewitching 

, which combines elements of installation and performance in the figure of a curvaceous, scantily clad woman covered in dirt marks and wearing a witch mask. Presented are photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath, who documented many aspects of the exhibition, including behind-the-scenes images of its installation. Also included are reproductions of Wolfson’s new series of wall-mounted sculptures comprised of bumper stickers overlaid on inkjet prints, candid photographs of the artist taken by Gaea Woods, and a text by the artist providing context for the visual material.

Jordan Wolfson: California

Julien Bismuth

Dylan Kenny

David Zwirner

Lucas Zwirner

Texts by Julien Bismuth and David Zwirner. Contributions by Dylan Kenny and Lucas Zwirner. Interview with Linda Norden

Up to his untimely death in 2006 at age 41, Jason Rhoades carried out a continuous assault on aesthetic conventions and the rules governing the art world—wryly subverting those very conditions by using them as materials for his work. In 2002, Rhoades introduced the world to his PeaRoeFoam, a “brand new product and revolutionary new material” created from whole green peas, fish-bait style salmon eggs, and white virgin-beaded foam. When combined with non-toxic glue, they transform into a versatile, fast-drying, and ultimately hard material that he intended for both utilitarian as well as artistic uses—his detailed step-by-step instructions accompanied do-it-yourself kits complete with everything needed to make PeaRoeFoam.

Rhoades debuted his PeaRoeFoam project at David Zwirner in 2002 (then located on Greene Street in SoHo) in the first of a trilogy of exhibitions that also brought it to Vienna and Liverpool the same year. Following the original “PeaRoeFormance” at the gallery, the artist moved the equipment to the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Vienna, where he added a makeshift karaoke studio, and then to the Liverpool Biennial, where he continued the production inside a giant, inflatable pool the shape and color of a human liver. PeaRoeFoam continued to be appropriated for subsequent works, but the majority of the leftovers and objects from all three “PeaRoeFormances” found a new place in Rhoades’s studio. Arranged on shelves covering the full length of a large wall, they remained on the location until after the artist’s death. The entirety of the installation, never previously shown, was exhibited as part of the comprehensive presentation of the PeaRoeFoam project at David Zwirner in New York in 2014.

This seminal publication is the first to properly examine and situate PeaRoeFoam within Rhoades’s career and to acknowledge its importance within the overall framework of his practice. The 2014 exhibition at David Zwirner presented many of the individual components for the first time since their original installations, and this book discusses and reproduces those initial presentations in depth. Also included is an abundance of archival documents and photographs, installation views of all 2002 shows, as well as the artist’s diagrams and drawings. The publication also features a personal and revealing essay by David Zwirner, who began showing Rhoades’s work in the early 1990s, new scholarship by Julien Bismuth, and selected interviews from the Jason Rhoades Oral History project, conceived by Dylan Kenny and Lucas Zwirner, who have interviewed over fifty artists, curators, friends, collaborators, art historians, and others who intimately knew the artist—including curator and art historian Linda Norden.

Jason Rhoades: PeaRoeFoam

Antoon Melissen

In the work of Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven, wrote 

 art critic Roberta Smith in 1999, “clarity and purity reign.” Born in Delft in 1914 and regarded as one of the most important Dutch artists of the twentieth century despite being relatively unknown in the United States, Schoonhoven was an active and influential player in the course of major European postwar developments in art, particularly related to monochromatic, serialized abstraction. His early abstract drawings, influenced by the work of Paul Klee, evolved into spare, delicate, and often grid-based sculptural wall reliefs. In the 1960s, Schoonhoven co-founded the avant-garde Nul-groep (Nul Group), a Dutch branch of the international ZERO movement that sought to reduce art to the zero degree by simplifying compositions and using everyday materials.

This catalogue was published in conjunction with the first significant presentation of Schoonhoven’s work in New York, if not the United States, in over a decade, held at David Zwirner in New York in 2015. Serving as an important contribution to English-language literature on the artist, this extensive exhibition catalogue is anchored by richly detailed plates of his sculptural reliefs and works on paper made primarily between the mid-1950s and early 1970s. During that period, Schoonhoven focused on the production of white, monochrome reliefs and black ink drawings, in which the integration of meticulous control and automatic gesture exemplify the artist’s ability to balance rigorous order with the expressiveness of the hand.

Featuring new scholarship by Antoon Melissen, one of the foremost authorities on Schoonhoven’s work, as well as archival photographs and an illustrated chronology, this publication offers an invaluable introduction to the work of this pioneering champion of the proto-Minimalist tendencies that sprang up in Europe and the United States in the early 1960s.

Jan Schoonhoven

Carter Ratcliff

Throughout his career, James Bishop has engaged with European and American traditions of postwar abstraction while developing a subtle, poetic, and highly unique visual language of his own. Alternating between—and at times interweaving—painting and drawing, Bishop’s works explore the ambiguities and paradoxes of material opacity and transparency, flatness and spatiality, as well as linear tectonics and loosely composed forms. Privileging the nuanced and expressive qualities of color and scale, Bishop’s luminous works have been described by American poet and art critic John Ashbery as “half architecture, half air.”

In the early 1960s, Bishop developed the vocabulary of color and form that would characterize his paintings on canvas for over twenty years: a reduced but rich palette, the employment of subtle architectonic abstractions, and a consistently large, square format that reinforces the viewer’s sense of scale and space. By overlapping thin but radiant veils of monochrome color, Bishop creates discrete geometric frameworks that suggest doors, windows, cubes, or what the artist describes as an uncertain scaffolding.

Published to coincide with James Bishop’s first solo presentation in New York since 1987, which was held at David Zwirner in New York in 2014, this volume includes works spanning the artist’s prolific career. The catalogue presents numerous large paintings on canvas from the 1960s to the early 1980s, as well as small-scale paintings on paper, to which Bishop turned exclusively in 1986 and which he continues to produce today. In addition, the book includes details and installation views, providing further context for understanding the artist’s work.

James Bishop

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