R. Crumb: Existential Comics,Selected Stories, 1979–2004

David Zwirner Books: Spring 2025

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

Edited by Janet Bishop and Cara Manes. Contributions by Genji Amino, Isabel Bird, Anne Anlin Cheng, Caitlin Haskell, Charlotte Healy, Corey Keller, Ruth Ozeki, Jeffrey Saletnik, Marin Sarve-Tarr, Dominika Tylcz, Jennie Yoon, and Marci Kwon.



A landmark survey of the wide-ranging practice of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative artists



Best known for her sinuous looped-wire sculptures, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) used everyday materials to create endlessly innovative works in a variety of media over her more than six-decade-long career, from her student days at the experimental Black Mountain College in the 1940s through her mature years in her adopted home city of San Francisco.

This extensively illustrated volume explores the astonishing expansiveness of Asawa’s work, from the abstract looped-wire sculptures for which she garnered national attention in the 1950s to her nature-inspired tied-wire pieces, clay and bronze casts, paperfolds, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and prints. The book explores the ways in which her longtime San Francisco home and garden served as the epicenter of her creative practice, and highlights the ethos of collaboration and inclusivity that informed her numerous public sculpture commissions and unwavering dedication to arts advocacy.

Essays and other writings consider Asawa and her work within the context of modern abstract sculpture, through the lens of craft and the materiality of wire, and in relation to her Asian American identity and her personal history as a Japanese American who was incarcerated with her family during World War II. Focus texts illuminate the connections between Asawa and key artistic figures such as Josef Albers, Imogen Cunningham, and R. Buckminster Fuller, with whom she maintained enduring relationships.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective

Portrait of Toba Khedoori, 1995. Photo by Rachel Khedoori.

Edited with text by Moritz Wesseler. Text by Mark Godfrey and Anna Lovatt.



Meticulously drawn objects against blank backgrounds form liminal spaces devoid of human presence or context



Australian-born artist Toba Khedoori’s (born 1964) oeuvre incorporates both drawing and painting. She arranges large sheets of paper worked with wax to form monumental image carriers on which she produces precise drawings using graphite and oil paint, which captivate with their execution and fine detail.

Toba Khedoori

Giorgio de Chirico

Fabio Benzi

ekphrasis

By Giorgio de Chirico. Introduction by Fabio Benzi



This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality.

In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting themes of mystery, myth, and the uncanny. Following the titular character Hebdomeros as he embarks on a series of philosophical musings and bizarre experiences divorced from a specific place or time, 

 embraces ambiguity in a profound exploration of the subconscious mind. Highly visual passages evoke the landscapes and compositions of de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, and non sequiturs mirror the freedom that Surrealism allowed for in art of all categories.

An introduction by the scholar Fabio Benzi contextualizes de Chirico’s work within a broader modernist framework, highlighting its influence on surrealism and its resonance with the literary and artistic movements of the early twentieth century.

A Novel

Hebdomeros

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

Anne Higonnet

By Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Introduction by Anne Higonnet



A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history

In her memoir, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun offers a candid and thoroughly enjoyable account of her life and art. She relates her encounters among the royalty and aristocracy she painted––including, most famously, her patron Marie Antoinette––and the effusive reception they extended to her across Europe. Forced to flee during the French Revolution, Vigée Le Brun traveled through Italy, Russia, Germany, and England, returning twelve years later to France under Napoleon I. These pages demonstrate her unflagging creativity during unstable times and her remarkable savvy. Her observations provide unique insight into the art world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a time when women were rarely allowed success.

In her introduction to this volume, the scholar Anne Higonnet conveys Vigée Le Brun’s unique position at a turning point in the art world, as well as the larger world beyond, and navigates in particular how one retroactively reconstructs a relationship to a world-changing revolution.

From a Memoir

Souvenirs

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Doro Globus

Explore the world of artist Yayoi Kusama in this lively, interactive lift-the-flap book for children ages 0–3.

Pumpkins, polka dots, flowers, and so much more! Yayoi Kusama creates art that's bursting with color and creativity, bringing “never-ending joy” to children. Her playful and vibrant masterpieces are perfect for young artists who love to explore and have fun with colors and shapes.

Kusama's radiant world invites young imaginations to run wild, offering endless possibilities for creative expression. With her signature bold patterns, she encourages kids to embrace their own unique artistic voices.

What Did Yayoi Kusama Make?

Explore the world of artist Ruth Asawa in this lively, interactive lift-the-flap book for children ages 0–3.

Ruth Asawa found inspiration everywhere—whether she looked to her children, her garden, or the warmth of her home, she believed that anything could become art. Her engaging work invites young artists to discover how creativity can sprout from anywhere.

Through her unique wire sculptures and natural watercolors, Asawa demonstrated that even the simplest materials can be transformed into something extraordinary. Her work encourages children to explore their own imaginations and to see the beauty in the everyday world around them.

What Did Ruth Asawa Make?

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

Portrait of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo by Stefan Ruiz

Jareh Das

Helen Molesworth

Jason Rosenfeld

Drew Thompson

Texts by Jareh Das, Helen Molesworth, Jason Rosenfeld, and Drew Thompson



The first monograph on the internationally celebrated Nigerian American painter who blends her personal history and African diasporic identity in layered compositions

“Critics have often (and rightly) marveled at the care and finesse with which Akunyili Crosby assembles vast multiplicities of time and place into singular sites of visual contestation.” —

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s work unites multiple places and temporalities, reflecting both personal and universal dimensions of contemporary life and, in particular, the intricacies of the African diasporic identity. This first monograph on Akunyili Crosby brings together nearly fifty paintings, made from 2010 to 2023, that chart her methodical practice of layering painted representations of people, locales, and aspects of her own experiences with transferred images sourced from her personal collection and Nigerian publications, among other outlets. Akunyili Crosby reveals and revisits distinct realms, from lush gardens to domestic, interior worlds related to motherhood, family, marriage, the body, and personal identity.

New texts from Jareh Das, Helen Molesworth, Jason Rosenfeld, and Drew Thompson focus on a range of themes in Akunyili Crosby’s work, including her visual language and material practice, her mixing of Western and Nigerian imagery and forms, and her use of photography in portraiture and figuration.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

An oil on canvas painting by Dana Schutz, titled The Arts, dated 2021.

Jarrett Earnest

Viscerally evocative, Dana Schutz’s newest paintings and sculptures depict allegorical scenes in which often grotesque characters negotiate their subjecthood.

Schutz’s large-scale paintings and sculptures portray tragicomic situations populated by characters preoccupied with self-preservation as they tilt toward oblivion. With mask-like features—all jaws and noses—they emerge, in groups and pairs, out of the painterly atmosphere. Enormous, vibrant, and enigmatic, her works convey tangible yet ineffable tensions and ambiguities of human life.

Published on the occasion of Schutz’s 2023 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, this catalogue features a long-form essay by Jarrett Earnest, who chronicles Schutz’s artistic process as she creates her most ambitious sculpture to date, 

. Earnest explores the interconnections between Schutz’s long-standing painting practice and her more recent engagement with sculpture, offering a fascinating reflection on her thematic explorations and artistic inquiry, and the conceptual underpinnings of her work. The text is accompanied by behind-the-scenes photography by Jason Schmidt, which offers an intimate view of the artist at work.

Dana Schutz: Jupiter’s Lottery

Dan Nadel

By R. Crumb. Edited and with an introduction by Dan Nadel



This volume brings together twenty-five of R. Crumb’s most ambitious, acclaimed, and profound comics.

One of the most influential and iconic cartoonists of our time, R. Crumb is celebrated for pushing the boundaries of representation, mass consumerism, and polite society. The comics in this volume exemplify Crumb’s creative output over twenty-five years following his early experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s.

The comics collected here depict characters searching for an understanding of the world around and within themselves. Through adaptation, autobiography, biography, and short fiction, Crumb—much like his subjects—demands we pay attention to our darkest desires, compulsions, fears, and obsessions. 

 also features a new, introductory comic strip by Crumb, reflecting on his practice in the context of this volume.

Editor Dan Nadel’s essay further weaves together Crumb’s life, career, and influences, delving into the creative environment that informed some of the artist’s most outstanding comics.

R. Crumb: Existential Comics, Selected Stories 1979–2004

Kayode Ojo

Ebony L. Haynes

Serubiri Moses

Clarion

Curator’s note by Ebony L. Haynes. Text by Serubiri Moses



Kayode Ojo’s sculptural installations made of ready-made items prompt reflections on class, consumption, and the fragility of luxury.

“There is a sense of urgency in these fleeting collisions between fashion and art. It’s the kind of tenuous exchange between culture and commerce that he does best.” 

Replete with sequins, chrome finishes, and transparent and reflective surfaces, Ojo’s sleek sculptures move between the related visual languages of delicate minimalism and glittering opulence, foregrounding the transformative power of the material object and its ability to transport its owner through dimensions of time, place, and social status. Sourcing his materials from fast-fashion websites and online shopping hubs, the artist weaves the familiar cadences of searching, scrolling, purchasing, and receiving into his nimble artistic practice. Ojo works instinctively to refashion these items into poetic yet perverse arrangements that make visible the phenomenon of social aspiration, unveiling its double-edged nature as a facilitator of both belonging and instability.

The texts in this volume, including a curator’s note by Ebony L. Haynes and an essay by Serubiri Moses, explore Ojo’s influences and examine the consumerism that is both called out by and a central component of the artist’s creative practice.

Kayode Ojo: EDEN

Heji Shin

Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle

Curator’s note by Ebony L. Haynes. Text by Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle



Heji Shin’s photographic practice pushes boundaries and challenges societal ideals surrounding fashion, celebrity, and sexuality.

“The German artist . . . is one of the wildest experimentalists working in photography today.” —

Shin’s practice oscillates fluidly between the commercial and fine-art realms, and the work she exhibits in gallery and museum contexts is strongly influenced by the editorial work she produces. For 

, a title that appropriates Helmut Newton’s series of the same name, Shin photographed pigs at close range, employing the vernacular of fashion photography to transform the pigs into models who appear to flirt with and pose for the camera. The photographs are paired with MRI scans and a holographic model of Shin’s brain—an impression of the self that troubles and transforms our foundational ideas of what constitutes a portrait.

Alongside a curator’s note from Ebony L. Haynes, this publication features a text by Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle that explores the interplay between Shin’s commercial and fine-art practices. This insightful analysis provides a deeper understanding of Shin’s work, shedding light on the nuances of her artistic choices.

Heji Shin: THE BIG NUDES

An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

Edited by Wells Fray-Smith, Eleanor Nairne, and Paola Malavassi

Forthcoming April 2025. Available for preorder.

This striking exhibition catalog celebrates the late artist whose deeply emotional works intermingled realism with abstraction to address complex themes of identity, race, and community.



American artist Noah Davis believed "painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It is visceral and immediate." Drawing on art history, personal archives, anonymous photography found in Los Angeles flea markets, and his own imagination, he compiled a ravishing body of figurative paintings that explore a range of Black life. Alongside his celebrated paintings, Davis made drawings, collages, and sculptures, and co-founded the Underground Museum.

This elegantly designed volume documents the span of Davis's career and attends to his commitment to representation in the art world and community engagement at the Underground Museum. Alongside new scholarship from writers, artists, and musicians like Tina M. Campt, Claudia Rankine, Marlene Dumas, and Jason Moran, this catalog features high-quality reproductions of Davis's more widely-known works as well as previously unseen archival material. A vital resource for understanding the depth and significance of his practice, this beautiful publication reveals how humanity, humor, imagination, and above all, people, were the epicenter of Davis's work.

Noah Davis

By Land, Air, Home, and Sea: The World of Frank Walter

Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures

David Zwirner Books: Spring 2024

Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers

Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982–2002

That Still Moment: Poetry and Essays on Dance

David Zwirner Books: Fall 2024

Discover the incandescent work of American abstract artist Joan Mitchell with this book bundle, featuring in-depth explorations of her bold paintings and lyrical compositions.

 (2024) focuses on the years 1979 to 1985—a significant and deeply generative period within Mitchell’s decades-long career.



Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me

 (2020) spotlights Mitchell’s large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Joan Mitchell Collection

A painting by Giorgio Morandi titled Natura morta (Still Life), dated 1956.

On Morandi’s exquisitely serene art as a distillation of the tumultuous 20th century

This volume positions Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) as a paradigmatic 20th-century figure: a man who lived through two world wars and experienced the full impact of the era’s disillusionments. Against this bleak backdrop, he sought stringent order and formal harmony, while leaving room for uncertainty and surprise. This clothbound volume spotlights the artist’s paintings and works on paper from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as a wealth of unpublished documents and photographs recently excavated from the Morandi family archives. Marilena Pasquali, an art historian and leading Morandi expert, interprets these materials, connecting them with the arc of his career. Alongside writings by other art historians, Pasquali casts Morandi’s art as an ongoing response to the tumultuous, dispiriting times in which he lived.

Giorgio Morandi: Time Suspended

Detail of an oil on linen painting, titled Clear Message, dated 2019.

"These paintings came together during the pandemic, a time when the streets of New York felt both familiar and strange. I spent a lot of days just looking at these buildings—ordinary places that suddenly seemed to have more to say. This book is a way to hold onto that time, to capture the city as it was, in all its grit and quiet. These aren’t just paintings; they’re moments of New York as I saw it, block by block. I hope you feel that connection too, page by page." —Josh Smith

Josh Smith: High as Fuck

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

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

Mark Godfrey

Conversation between Oscar Murillo and Mark Godfrey

Looking back at Oscar’s practice for the last 10 years, specifically, the progression of the themes of blackness/void, games and failure, the book is a non-linear journey, finding moments of convergence between shows and artworks that have informed Murillo’s new series. Throughout the book runs in parallel relevant works and a conversation between Oscar Murillo and Mark Godfrey which delves into the details of Murillo’s process and influences.

Inspired by the 1950s Brazilian neo-concrete movement, the photographic editing of the shows and artworks seeks to spark a poetic feeling in contrast to the rigidness of the design.

Shows highlighted in the book include Venice Biennale (2015), Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2021), South London Gallery (2013), Carlos/Ishikawa (2012) and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2024) in between others.

Oscar Murillo: Aesthetic Structures

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

Text by Nicholas Baume and Alberto Rios de la Rosa

Huma Bhabha’s new body of work was made during a three-week residency at Casa Wabi in early 2022. She traveled from Poughkeepsie, a small city on the Hudson River north of New York City, escaping winter and discovering the Oaxacan coast. Alongside a group of fellow artists in residence — each making work in their own studios, sharing meals and the experience of this unique meeting of landscape, culture, and Tadao Ando’s architecture – Bhabha has experimented with local materials and traditional methods to create an installation that brings into dialogue with this remarkable place her own very distinctive aesthetic.

Huma Bhabha: Fundación Casa Wabi was published on the occasions of the exhibitions 

 (2023) at Fundación Casa Wabi’s Puerto Escondido and Mexico City locations, respectively. 

Huma Bhabha: Fundación Casa Wabi

Sasha Gordon, 2024. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Texts by Liz Munsell and Kristina Parsons. Contributions by Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Sasha Gordon, Sara Issakharian, Chella Man, Ilana Savdie, Austin Martin White, and Rosha Yaghmai. Photography by Mary Kang and Abby Ross.



An investigation of seven emerging artists who use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to challenge the boundaries of traditional figuration.



Color is flexible and amorphous. It lends itself to infinite perceptions and refuses to be definitive. 

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration

 discusses new work by seven emerging artists who use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to unsettle the figure. In painting, sculpture, and installation they push at and spill over the outermost limits of realism. Their high-key palettes and disorienting glow defamiliarize human and anthropomorphic forms, highlighting the figure’s manipulability and continual metamorphosis. These artists refute any fixed notions of the self and thwart reductive interpretations, generating space for resilient, transgressive, and exuberant bodies that cannot be placed or contained.

In their work the artists take in and take on the oversaturation of our contemporary moment. They invoke surreal slippages between everyday horrors and their unbound imaginations. This multiethnic, multiracial, and multifaceted group of makers leverage palettes that reflect their cross-cultural allegiances and lived experiences—whether nodding to their respective heritages, to pop culture and digital immersion, or spaces of youthful and queer liberation. Modern and contemporary artists have long offered a counterpoint to strongholds within Western art history that have insisted on a muted palette as an indicator of purity, seriousness, and whiteness—since the Renaissance’s focus on linear perspective and recasting of classical sculpture in white. At a time of deep reconsideration of canons and institutions, this presentation reflects on how color has been othered—perceived as emotional, subjective, and secondary to line in importance. The artists in 

 embrace color to push against such hierarchies. Taken together, their works convey today’s zeitgeist of frenzied too-muchness and all-at-onceness, in-betweenness and expansiveness, ultimately showing interlinked experiences across many spectrums.

A detail from a painting by Portia Zvavahera, titled This is where I travelled [3], dated 2020.

Portia Zvavahera, Ndirikukuona (I can see you), 2021

Text by Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama, Tamar Garb, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Fiona Bradley, Andrew Nairne

This new publication accompanies a major exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, which will include reproductions of brand new works created on the occasion of this exhibition alongside a selection of recent and older paintings which reveal the depth and richness of Zvavahera’s practice. The focus will be on the theme of dreams, fantasy and figuration, and large details will highlight Zvavahera’s innovative amalgamation of printmaking and painting techniques that build rich surfaces to create her private cosmology of creatures and contexts.

The book will feature a significant new essay from curator Tamar Garb and will centre around an extensive conversation between Garb, Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela discussing Zvavahera’s engagement with eros, intimacy and female-centred experience.

The book will open up how Zvavahera’s works emerge from dreams; being figurative without being illustrative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy.

Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa

Edited with text by Josef Helfenstein and Olga Osadtschy. Text by Aden Kumler, Simon Baier, Elena Degen, Jules Pelta Feldman, Aden Kumler, Daniel Kurjakovic, Han Lo, and Mechtild Widrich



Flavin’s “gaseous images” illuminate the landscape of the Kunstmuseum Basel

Legendary minimalist artist Dan Flavin (1933–96) began working with fluorescent light tubes in the early 1960s. Arranged in “situations,” he would then further develop them into series and large-scale installations. His pieces often included dedications, making reference in their titles to concrete events, such as wartime atrocities or police violence, or to other artists. The colors and dimensions of the materials he used were prescribed by industrial production. Flooded in light, viewers themselves become part of the works. The space, along with the objects within it, are set in relation to each other and thus become immersive experiences of art, triggering sensual, almost spiritual experiences. Flavin liberated color from the two-dimensionality of painting. This catalog looks at Flavin’s oeuvre in a less familiar setting: the indoor and outdoor spaces of the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights

Texts by Diedrich Diederichsen, Daniel Buchholz, and Christopher Müller. Contributions by Dieter Schwarz, Sabine Breitwieser, Manfred Hermes, Tom McDonough, Juliane Rebentisch, and Isa Genzken. Introduction by Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti. Conversations on the artist by Wolfgang Tillmans and Diedrich Diederichsen



For a long time, I went about my work very conceptually. With the hi-fi photographs, ellipsoids, or with the works made of concrete, I had an idea and realized it forcefully. Then I stopped doing that, suddenly, and a new phase started. Just go ahead. And yet the rigor of all those earlier years is still in me. Now I have slowly reached the point where I can say I want to do something again that I think about very

—Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans

This comprehensive monograph is published in conjunction with Isa Genzken’s eponymous exhibition at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, gathering 75 sculptures by the artist. Alongside many photographs of the works on display, the catalogue, edited by Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller, assembles texts by Dieter Schwarz, Sabine Breitwieser, Manfred Hermes, Tom McDonough, Juliane Rebentisch, and Isa Genzken, a preface by curators Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti, and a new essay by Diedrich Diederichsen, as well as two conversations on the artist with Wolfgang Tillmans and Diedrich Diederichsen.

Isa Genzken: 75/75

All Books

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.