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A holiday photo by Cynthia Zarin of a canal in Venice.

Cynthia Zarin

Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

To Venice and Rome

Diana Thater and Rachel Rose

A detail from Marcel Dzama's coloring book, titled Coloring the Moon Pink, dated 2020.

Coloring the Moon Pink

News

Marcel Dzama: Coloring the Moon Pink

, a collection of eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus between 1920 and 1926.

Read Jarrett Earnest's interviews with Holland Cotter, Darby English, and Siri Hustvedt, published in 

What It Means to Write About Art, Interviews with Art Critics

, a catalogue of photographs by Roy DeCarava, and watch a video introducing the artist's life and work.

, the most comprehensive collection of the artist’s writings assembled to date.

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa

, published this year by Chronicle Books.

Read excerpts from “Serene’’ and “Roma’’, chapters in the forthcoming book 

, and listen to a podcast with the author.

Joan Mitchell: I carry my landscapes around with me.

Read James Baldwin's introduction to the exhibition catalogue for 

 by Emma Enderby, an essay in the publication accompanying Oscar Murillo's major exhibition at Haus der Kunst in 2017.

, c. 1525 (detail). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York


“Live for a while in these books.’’

Excerpts from David Zwirner Books

To Stay up to Date about New Exhibitions, Available Works, and Artist News

Learn more about this exhibition at our Paris gallery

Andra Ursuţa: Void Fill

At home with the artist and his family

William Eggleston in Memphis

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by William Eggleston and John McCracken—the first time these two iconic American artists have been featured together. On view at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York, 

 places Eggleston and McCracken into dialogue around their expressive use of color and light, and their distinct versions of American vernacular culture.

Born within five years of one another—McCracken in Berkeley, California, in 1934, and Eggleston in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939—both artists came of age outside of the dominant centers of the art world, internalizing the spaces and light of the American West and South. Working in sculpture and photography, respectively, each would go on to break with the practices of their contemporaries and challenge the traditional boundaries of their media in search of a new form of expression.

Occupying a singular position within the recent history of American art, McCracken is known for his work that melds the restrained formal qualities of minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish.

Eggleston pioneered the use of color photography, elevating the medium to the art form that it is recognized as today, through his novel pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. Both artists find common ground in their sharp formal sensibilities and distinctive eye for color.

Through their own unique visions, both artists eschew fixed meaning, privileging the subjective experience of the viewer and granting us access to a private world in which we might recognize a wider one and, in turn, also ourselves. Found within McCracken’s imbued spirituality or Eggleston’s embracing of the spiritual banal is the chromatically seductive revelation of the self in the everyday. What remains is a space for new stories, including our own.

Image: (Left) John McCracken, New Mexico, 1996 (detail); (Right) William Eggleston, self-portrait, c. 1967–1970 (detail)

Learn more about this exhibition at our 69th Street gallery

Learn more about William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories

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Published on the occasion of the 

 of the artist's work at David Zwirner, New York in 2013, 

 charts the evolution of the artist's diverse oeuvre, encompassing both well-known and lesser-seen examples of his production from the early 1960s up through his death in 2011 with a range of sculptures, paintings, and sketches. Featuring an essay by art historian Robin Clark, excerpted here, it includes reproductions of fascinating archival and documentary material that was discovered during the curatorial process, from the artist’s sketches to gallery invitation cards, early catalogue covers, historic photographs, as well as installation views of the exhibition.

John McCracken was a leading practitioner of minimal art, a mystic, an idealist, and an accomplished craftsman. His instantly recognizable geometric sculptures (blocks, columns, pyramids, and, in particular, planks) are both hermetic and expansive. Self-contained in their angular compression, McCracken’s sculptures are also exquisitely responsive to changes in ambient conditions such as light and movement. Often vibrantly hued or glossy black, these objects appear from some angles to be blunt forms, while from other points of view the polished surfaces mirror their surroundings, causing the sculptures to appear ghostly or transparent (fig. 1 and plate 6). This paradox, and the suggestion of entertaining multiple realities simultaneously, is central to McCracken’s practice. McCracken refined his techniques as a craftsman not for the sake of craft itself, but to create works that in their reflective finish contradict their own materiality. “I like to foster work that actually is in the world,” he explained, “ . . . separate from the world, yet includes the world too.”

William Eggleston and John McCracken True Stories

David Zwirner Books

John McCracken: Thresholds

John McCracken: Thresholds by Robin Clark

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.