Ad Reinhardt

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of work from the 1940s by Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York. Organized in collaboration with the Ad Reinhardt Foundation, this is the third solo exhibition of Reinhardt’s work at David Zwirner, following major presentations of his black paintings in 2013 and his blue paintings in 2017.

Reinhardt charted a unique and radically experimental path in his art during the 1940s, thrusting himself, from the outset of the decade, into the project of completely non-objective painting. While many of his contemporaries treated the canvas as a stage for depicting archetypal forms, mythic iconography, and the representation of the subconscious, Reinhardt pursued and achieved a degree of directness in his exploration of color, line, and form that would not be matched by his fellow American abstractionists until the end of the decade. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois notes: “Reinhardt was perhaps the only American artist in the forties … to understand what the real issues were at the time. In this sense … he was already (even before the fifties) an artist of the sixties.”¹ 

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1 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Limit of Almost,” Ad Reinhardt. Exh. cat. (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 17.

Image: Ad Reinhardt, Untitled, c. 1940. © Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2023.