Since rising to prominence in the late 1990s, 

 (b. 1974) has developed an immediately recognizable visual language that investigates human action and motivation, as well as the blurred relationship between the real and the subconscious. Drawing equally from folk vernacular as from art-historical and contemporary influences, Dzama’s work visualizes a universe of childhood fantasies and otherworldly fairy tales.

Dzama was born in Winnipeg, Canada, where he received his BFA in 1997 from the University of Manitoba. Since 1998, his work has been represented by David Zwirner. The artist has had fourteen solo exhibitions with the gallery, including 

 which was his ﬁrst presentation at the London location in 2013 and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by Hatje Cantz, with an essay by Deborah Solomon. In 2014, David Zwirner presented a solo exhibition of Dzama’s work at the gallery in New York, which marked the United States debut of his film 

Une danse des bouffons (A jester’s dance)

. In 2016, the gallery held two exhibitions in New York and London dedicated to the collaborative works by Dzama and Raymond Pettibon. 

, which marked the artist’s first solo presentation in Greater China, was on view at the Hong Kong gallery in 2019. In 2020, David Zwirner Online presented 

, an online exhibition of Dzama’s work, and in July of the same year, 

 was featured at the gallery's Paris location. In 2021, 

 was presented at the gallery’s 69th Street location in New York and in 2022, David Zwirner, London, presented 

Dzama has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. In 2022, a solo presentation of the artist's work, 

Marcel Dzama: Viviendo en el limbo y soñando con el paraíso

 was on view at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Mexico. 

was on view in 2021 at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia. Also in 2021, the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland presented an exhibition of the artist’s work entitled 

 a film and performance commissioned by Performa as part of 

 was presented at Galería Helga de Alvear in Madrid and 

 was shown at University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2017, La Casa Encendida in Madrid exhibited 

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

 was presented alongside related two- and three-dimensional work at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis. In 2010, a major survey of the artist's work was held at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Other solo exhibitions include those organized by Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2014); Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid (2013); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Mexico; World Chess Hall of Fame and Museum, St. Louis (all 2012); Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (both 2011); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2008); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (2006); and Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France (2005).

In 2021, MTA Arts & Design unveiled a commissioned mosaic by the artist, 

, that is permanently on view at the Bedford Avenue Station in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2016, the artist created the costume and stage design for New York City Ballet’s 

, a performance based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Coinciding with the performance, Dzama also created an installation in the Promenade of the David H. Koch Theater as part of the New York City Ballet Art Series, titled 

The tension around which history is built

Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Dallas Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Dzama lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

 (1983–2015) created a distinctive body of paintings that effortlessly synthesizes a wide range of reference points, pivoting between scenes of everyday life and surreal derivations thereof. As curator Helen Molesworth describes, “[Davis’s] paintings are both figurative and abstract, realistic and dreamlike; they are about blackness and the history of Western painting, drawn from photographs and from life; they are exuberant and doleful in their palette, influenced by European painters Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans, as well as American ones such as Mark Rothko and Fairfield Porter. They tend toward the ravishing. A master of sophisticated compositions, he had a knack for establishing three-dimensional space while remaining highly attuned to the flatness of the canvas.”

Born in Seattle, Davis studied painting at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where, in 2012, he founded The Underground Museum in the city’s Arlington Heights neighborhood with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis.

Davis’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California (2008, 2010, and 2013); Tilton Gallery, New York (2009 and 2011); PAPILLION, Los Angeles (2014); and the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago (2016), among others. 

 opened at The Underground Museum on the day of the artist’s untimely death at age thirty-two, due to complications from a rare cancer. In 2016, the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, presented the two-person exhibition 

Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum

—the first large-scale museum show to explore Davis’s work alongside that of his brother’s. In 2020, an acclaimed solo presentation of Davis’s work went on view at David Zwirner, New York, later traveling to The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, in 2022. A retrospective of Davis’s work is currently on view at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus, Potsdam, Germany; the exhibition will travel to the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2025.

In 2022, a selection of the artist's work was presented at the 59th Venice Biennale. The artist’s work was featured in the landmark exhibition 

, which was organized by the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, and traveled extensively throughout the United States from 2008 to 2022. Davis’s work has been included in other notable group exhibitions, including ones held at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California (2010 and 2020); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012 and 2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2017); and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams (2018). Davis is currently featured in 

The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure

, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through February 9, 2025. The exhibition was previously on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London and The Box, Plymouth, England; it will travel to the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, later in 2025. Davis’s work will also be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in the exhibition, 

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now

In 2021, David Zwirner, London, presented a solo exhibition of the artist’s work, providing an overview of Davis’s brief but expansive career. A monograph, 

, from David Zwirner Books, was published on the occasion of the exhibition, featuring a new essay by curator Franklin Sirmans; a roundtable discussion with curator Thomas Lax, artists Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu, and poet and scholar Fred Moten, moderated by Helen Molesworth; and an extensive new chronology by Lindsay Charlwood. 

, a solo exhibition of Davis’s work curated by his widow, the artist Karon Davis,

is currently on view at David Zwirner’s 69th Street location.

Davis was the recipient of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2013 Art Here and Now (AHAN): Studio Forum award. Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Rubell Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 Helen Molesworth, “Noah Davis, An Introduction,” in Molesworth, ed., 

, exh. cat. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2020), p. 7.

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

American artist, educator, and arts advocate 

 (1926-2013) is known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form through their emphasis on lightness and transparency. Born in rural California, Asawa first studied under professional artists while her family and other people of Japanese descent were detained at Santa Anita, California, in 1942. Following her release from an incarceration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, sixteen months later, she enrolled in 1943 in Milwaukee State Teachers College. Unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans, Asawa left Milwaukee in 1946 to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then known for its progressive pedagogical methods and avant-garde aesthetic environment. Asawa's time at Black Mountain proved formative in her development as an artist, and she was particularly influenced by her teachers Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn. She also met architectural student Albert Lanier, whom she would marry in 1949 and with whom she would raise a large family and build a career in San Francisco. Asawa continued to produce art steadily over the course of more than a half century, creating a cohesive body of sculptures and works on paper that, in their innovative use of material and form, deftly synthesizes a wide range of aesthetic preoccupations at the heart of postwar art in America.

Asawa’s work has been exhibited widely since the early 1950s, including early solo exhibitions at Peridot Gallery, New York in 1954, 1956, and 1958. In 1965, Walter Hopps organized a solo exhibition of the artist’s sculptures and drawings at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in California, where Asawa completed a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop the same year. Other solo presentations include those held at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1973); Fresno Art Museum, California (2001; traveled to Oakland Museum of California through 2002); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2006); Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2012); and the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California (2014).

In 2018 to 2019, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis presented the major museum exhibition 

. An accompanying catalogue published by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Yale University Press includes essays by Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg. The two-person exhibition, 

was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021. In 2022, 

 was on view at Modern Art Oxford, England, and later traveled to the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway. In September 2023, 

, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, in 2024.

The artist’s works have also been included in significant group exhibitions, including 

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957

, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015; traveled to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, through 2017); 

, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); 

Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016

Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction

, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); 

The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists

, The Drawing Center, New York (2019); and 

In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury

, Art Institute of Chicago (2019). A selection of the artist's work was presented at the 59th Venice Biennale, 

In addition to her wire sculptures, Asawa is well known for her public commissions, particularly in San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. These include the much beloved 

fountain in Ghirardelli Square (1966-1968) and the 

 outside the Grand Hyatt Union Square (1970-1973), the latter of which includes hundreds of baker’s clay images molded by local schoolchildren, friends, and other artists cast in bronze.

Upon moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa, a firm believer in the radical potential of arts education from her time at Black Mountain College, devoted herself to expanding access to art-focused educational programs. She co-founded the Alvarado School Arts Workshop in 1968 and was instrumental in the creation of the first public arts high school in San Francisco in 1982, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in her honor in 2010. Additionally, Asawa served on the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a trustee of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Asawa was awarded a 2022 National Medal of Arts by President Joe Biden in 2024, only the second visual artist to receive this high honor posthumously.

The Estate of Ruth Asawa has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017. The gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition of the artist’s work took place the same year in New York, and was accompanied by an extensive publication that includes texts by Tiffany Bell and Robert Storr and features an illustrated chronology. In 2020, the gallery’s London location presented 

, which was the first major presentation of the artist’s work outside of the United States. In 2021, 

was on view at the gallery’s West 20th Street location in New York. 

, curated by Janet Bishop and Cara Manes, will open at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, through January 2027. The first international institutional and posthumous retrospective of the artist’s work, the exhibition is accompanied by a forthcoming catalogue with new scholarship.

The artist’s work is represented in prominent museum collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Asawa has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards.

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

’s (b. 1929) work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop art and minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at once to microscopic and macroscopic universes.

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama has been the subject of both solo and group presentations worldwide. She presented her first solo show in her native Japan in 1952. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking and influential happenings, events, and exhibitions. Her work gained renewed widespread recognition in the late 1980s following a number of international solo exhibitions, including shows at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, both of which took place in 1989. She represented Japan in 1993 at the 45th Venice Biennale, to much critical acclaim. In 1998, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, co-organized 

, which toured to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1998-1999), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1999).

In 2011 to 2012, her work was the subject of a large-scale retrospective that traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From 2012 through 2015, three major museum solo presentations of the artist’s work simultaneously traveled to major museums throughout Japan, Asia, and Central and South America. In 2015, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, organized a comprehensive overview of Kusama’s practice that traveled to Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Helsinki Art Museum. In 2017-2019, a major survey of the artist’s work, 

, was presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Seattle Art Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. 

, which marked the first large-scale exhibition of Kusama’s work presented in Southeast Asia, opened at the National Gallery of Singapore in 2017 and traveled to the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Jakarta. In 2019, 

 an exhibition tailor-made specifically for the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, included more than forty works by the artist.

A comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work was on view at Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2021, and traveled to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2022. 

 was on view at The New York Botanical Garden in 2021. In 2022, several major exhibitions of the artist’s work opened, including 

Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE, 

One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection, 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. A major retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre, 

was on view from 2022 to 2023 at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, then traveled to Guggenheim Bilbao (2023) and Serralves Museum, Portugal (2024). Also in 2023, 

was on view at Aviva Studios, Manchester, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami presented the exhibition 

 was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2024.

In 2023, a commissioned mosaic by Kusama, 

A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe

 (2022) was unveiled at the new Madison Concourse at Grand Central Station, New York, and will remain on permanent view.

Kusama has been represented by David Zwirner since 2013. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 2013 with the artist, titled

, spanned all three spaces at West 19th Street in New York. Her second gallery solo show, 

, was held at David Zwirner, New York, in 2015. Subsequent solo shows of the artist’s work at David Zwirner, New York include 

 in 2019. In 2021, David Zwirner, Victoria Miro, and Ota Fine Arts jointly presented 

I WANT YOUR TEARS TO FLOW WITH THE WORDS I WROTE

 in London, Tokyo, and New York. In 2023 at the gallery’s 19th Street location, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with David Zwirner, 

Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers

Yayoi Kusama Museum, a museum dedicated to the artist’s work, opened October 1, 2017, in Tokyo with the inaugural exhibition 

Creation is a Solitary Pursuit, Love is What

. The museum’s fourteenth exhibition devoted to her work, 

Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among numerous others. Kusama lives and works in Tokyo.

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

go beyond canonical art to capture the modern and contemporary spirit of today’s most acclaimed painters, sculptors, and other major creative forces. Created in close collaboration with each artist or artist’s estate, these beautifully produced blank books—with their stunning wraparound cover artwork, endpapers, patterned interior pages, and bellybands that transform into collectible bookmarks—are works of art themselves, designed to inspire, collect, and gift to a wide audience.

The Artist Journals

 go beyond canonical art to capture the modern and contemporary spirit of today’s most acclaimed painters, sculptors, and other major creative forces. Created in close collaboration with each artist or artist’s estate, these beautifully produced blank books—with their stunning wraparound cover artwork, endpapers, patterned interior pages, and bellybands that transform into collectible bookmarks—are works of art themselves, designed to inspire, collect, and gift to a wide audience.

The Artist Journals Collection

The Artist Journals Collection | 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.