, Jenny Holzer, Rashid Johnson, Lorna Simpson, and Rosemarie Trockel—to create face masks in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The masks are being sustainably produced with three layers of 100% cotton in accordance with the French government’s regulations for Category 1 face masks, recommended for persons in regular contact with the public. Worn correctly, Category 1 face masks reduce the chance of the mask-wearer spreading the virus. We wear reusable cotton masks to protect each other and reduce the overall environmental viral load.

Half of the proceeds will be donated to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund and the other half will be split between two artist relief charities, Artist Relief Coalition and Common Practice, both of which are supporting US and UK artists whose livelihoods have been affected by the pandemic.

The designed masks are available for six months exclusively at MATCHESFASHION, beginning August 24.

To read more about the project and to purchase a mask, 

Cover image: Face mask by Barbara Kruger. Photo by ZUUMEO

Featuring Barbara Kruger, Raymond Pettibon, and more

Face Masks from Gallery Artists

Media

Artist Talks & Events

Luc Tuymans and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Image With Caption

Artists in the News

Barbara Kruger among T Magazine’s The Greats

Artist Collaboration

Plan Your Vote with Marcel Dzama

“What would be relevant? What could be interesting? What could be important? What could be meaningful? Because that’s the most important thing: It has to be meaningful for me, otherwise I can’t make it.”

Read the full feature in 

 opens at David Zwirner Hong Kong on October 27. On the occasion of the exhibition, the artist will be in conversation with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist about his recent work on Saturday, October 24.

Image: Luc Tuymans at his studio in Antwerp, 2020 (detail). Photo by Mieke Verbijlen

The artist featured in T Magazine

Artist Questionnaire: Luc Tuymans

Excerpts from David Zwirner Books

"Live for a while in these books."

A detail from a painting by Alice Neel, titled Takahara Shindu, dated 1969.

Lìxià

Now Open

Hong Kong Gallery Reopening and Online Viewing Room

’s hands were tiny. They were also chapped—cut by the wire she worked with all her life. I know this because when she was in her sixties, she cast them in bronze, preserving her battle scars for posterity. I held the casts for a moment or so when I visited her children in San Francisco last year, and remember even now how the crinkles and ridges on the pads of her fingers bristled against my own.

What can we really understand of the toil required of an artist? Or, for that matter, the sacrifices and the doubt. We only ever meet them at the point of success, when they are over the divide; a practicality that renders their years of becoming—years in which they strived and struggled and took wrong turns and probably wept—mute.

Asawa, who died in 2013, created a vast body of work in her eighty-seven years. Work that remains wonderfully, irresistibly vital. She hit on her loop process in 1947 (while on a visit to Mexico, where she watched baskets being made) and became so good at it that she could work with three strands of wire at once.

There were also a great many paintings, drawings, and clay models. Every surface in the house was given over to whatever Asawa happened to be working on at the time. Her children would often find pieces stuffed in the dishwasher, which had never worked.

Like many other talented women of her generation, though, who came to prominence when macho abstract expressionism held sway, Asawa has only recently emerged from the “domestic artist” doldrums to which she was consigned by her critics. (Her reviews from this time, though favorable, often end with the caveat that she was “a housewife and a mother,” ergo, how could she also be a serious artist?)

Other factors were in play: that she was the daughter of Japanese immigrants, for one, at a time when the Second World War still pulsed raw in people’s memories (Asawa and her family were among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent to be placed in internment camps between 1942 and 1946).

And that she had committed the sin of operating from America’s West rather than East Coast, a geographical distinction about which the art world remained nonsensically sniffy until well into the 1960s.

None of it diluted her drive, which all her life was urgent and compelling (it’s hard to think of another artist who cared less than Asawa about external approval, in fact). She drew near constantly, believing the practice a non-negotiable habit. Even if they didn’t become artists, she told her children, drawing would make them better at whatever else they chose to do.

Asawa learned this at Black Mountain College—a short-lived, progressive arts school in rural North Carolina, founded and staffed by some of the German Bauhaus émigrés. I mention this because it was where she met the noted American architect Albert Lanier (1927–2008), who later told their children that his first sight of Asawa, coming down the path from the apple orchard there, left him smitten. The pair married in 1949.

That, though, is a splinter of the story, and where I will leave you before you begin this excerpt from Marilyn Chase’s biography of Asawa, 

. The passage covers the year that Asawsa was still at Black Mountain and Lanier was out in the world trying to get a foothold, so they could marry—no small thing at a time when public approval of interracial relationships tarried at 5 percent.

The letters passed back and forth between them, and those exchanged with their families and fellow artists, reveal not only how enchanted Asawa and Lanier were by the pull of their feelings for each other, but the difficulties that their love affair presented, and how torn Asawa was all the while between having a family and making work.

This is what I think about now, when I remember Asawa’s hands. What she had to overcome to be an artist; the graft involved once she had made the decision to do so, how crucial it was to her well-being, how she succeeded in folding it into her children’s lives. To follow all that as it is happening, as she is being formed, is a delight.



Albert Lanier’s Model A jalopy was holding up and getting good gas mileage.
“It’s the strangest looking car ever,” he wrote to his parents in Georgia. “Children run out and wave and flock around us wherever we stop.”
To avoid the heat, Albert and his friends slept during the day and drove at night on their way from Black Mountain College in North Carolina to San Francisco. When they ran low on funds near the end of the trip, Albert resorted to selling his blood in Las Vegas. Tired from the procedure, he slept and awoke to find his traveling companions fresh from a gambling spree and sporting new shirts bought with his “blood money.” They had barely enough for the bridge toll across San Francisco Bay. He’d laugh about it later.

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa

David Zwirner Books

David Zwirner Books publications and other news

 is the first in-depth study of a monumental wall hanging—rediscovered after many years—by renowned Bauhaus artist Anni Albers, who was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art.

Albers was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art. Her exquisite wall hanging 

—seen for the first time outside of Mexico City at 

, in 2019, and the subject of this book—is a superb example of this modern master’s work.

In 1967, noted architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned Albers to create a work for the newly built Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. Completed in 1968, her striking wall hanging 

is heavily influenced by Latin American art and culture. Showcasing Albers’s approach to working with textiles as a “many-sided practice,” it is accompanied in this book by works Albers made following her move to the United States in 1933, including innovative wall hangings, weavings, and a range of works on paper. Together, these works reflect Albers’s brilliant embrace of different materials and techniques and her ability to work at varied scales. The works in this publication offer additional context and motifs, demonstrating the artist’s pioneering investment in textiles as an art form and her parallel interest in mass-produced designs.

Published on the occasion of the Anni Albers exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this catalogue features new scholarship from the show’s curator, Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and T’ai Smith, an expert on Bauhaus craft and weaving.

Image: Anni Albers, 

Anni Albers: Camino Real

Anni Albers: Camino Royale

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.