Raymond Saunders

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by American artist Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) at the gallery’s Paris location. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, this presentation will be Saunders’s second solo exhibition with David Zwirner and marks the artist’s first exhibition in Paris in twenty years. This show anticipates the forthcoming major solo exhibition Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden, which opens March 22, 2025, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, before traveling to the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California.

Saunders once called Paris—where he kept a studio, spent summers, and exhibited from around 1990 through the mid-2000s—“a home away from home,” embracing the French capital as a generative place for art making and community building. The city offered a hopeful context that was free of many of the social and racial constraints endemic to American culture. Embodying some of the themes that came out of Saunders’s time in Paris, the works in this exhibition incorporate motifs that recur in compositions throughout the artist’s mature oeuvre, such as urnlike vases and flowers—some of which resemble non-native species whose presence could have resulted from a transatlantic migration. Featured will be a selection of paintings primarily from the 1990s that demonstrate Saunders’s singular aesthetic as well as a focused installation of intimate, elegantly restrained depictions of flowers rendered in watercolor and graphite on paper.