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

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carol Bove: The Facade Commission

Ruth Asawa Drawing in Space

"An American master"

Celebrating Ruth Asawa

"It is said that the future is female, and one can only hope. But it is important to remember that the past, through continuous excavation, is becoming more female all the time. The latest evidence is the gloriously relentless retrospective of Alice Neel (1900-1984), the radical realist painter of all things human, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

 is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through August 1, 2021.

To be updated on upcoming exhibitions and other artist news

Artists in the News

Alice Neel in The New York Times

In 2020

A MESSAGE FROM YAYOI KUSAMA TO THE WHOLE WORLD

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At the New York Botanical Garden

KUSAMA: COSMIC NATURE

Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray for Love

The artist's most personal book to date

Yayoi Kusama: Every Day I Pray For Love

 are pleased to announce that they will jointly present new 

 in London, Tokyo, and New York this summer. A dynamic installation of canvases will be unveiled at Victoria Miro in London on 4 June as part of a major exhibition of new paintings and sculptures. Later in June, exhibitions of 

paintings will be presented at David Zwirner, New York, on 17 June and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, on 19 June.

The paintings that will be on view are new examples drawn from the artist’s highly celebrated, ongoing 

series, which she commenced in 2009 and has worked on in a more intimate format since 2019. At once bold and intensely detailed and conveying extraordinary vitality, these works are joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual. They abound with imagery including eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, including the dots with which the artist is synonymous, to offer impressions of worlds both abstract and figurative, microscopic and macroscopic. Their use of minute details and repetition—in terms of both shapes and brushwork—reflects the history of the obsessive gesture within Kusama’s practice, positioning this body of work as an important link between her past and present.

In April 2020, Kusama released 

 in the form of a poem of resilience and hope. It included the words, ‘In the midst of this historic menace, a brief burst of light points to the future. Let us joyfully sing this song of a splendid future. Let’s go …’ A full year later and Kusama wishes to share with the world these personal and poignant paintings that she has created throughout this most historic of times.



 is currently on view at The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York, until 31 October 2021. 

 opens at the Gropius Bau in Berlin on 23 April 2021 and will be presented until 15 August 2021. 

 opens this spring at Tate Modern in London.

Image: Yayoi Kusama. Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

To be the First to Know about this Exhibition and other Kusama News

Yayoi Kusama to Present New Work this Summer

 has created four sculptures for The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches. 

The Facade Commission: Carol Bove, The séances aren’t helping

 is the second commission to be featured on the Museum’s facade and will be on view through fall 2021. Made of sandblasted, contorted stainless-steel tubes and five-foot-wide reflective aluminum disks, the sculptures appear astoundingly lithe and supple, almost mercurial, despite their weight and heft—an effect Bove achieves by pushing her materials to their physical limits using incredible force. Projecting outward from the niches, the works confound perception.

Bove works improvisationally and sculpts at scale and in the round, without preparatory drawings. For this commission, she used a one-to-one mock-up of the Museum’s empty niches that was created in her studio. Bove chose a series of nonrepresentational forms that resonate with modernist styles such as Art Deco and abstraction—a stark contrast to the traditional figurative sculptures that the architect Richard Morris Hunt envisioned for The Met’s facade, which was completed in 1902, but was never fully realized. Bove based the size of the aluminum disks on the diameter of the columns that flank the Museum’s niches and the medallion portraits that adorn the spandrels of the arches. The differing orientations result in a playful, rhythmic pattern, yielding a frisson of delight that might throw viewers slightly off-balance. By astutely engaging the Museum’s facade, reimagining its history, and retooling some of its architectural and design elements, the artist subtly calls for us to reevaluate and reckon with the legacies of tradition.

“Seen from Fifth Avenue," Jason Farago writes in 

, "they appear like a quartet of performers,” Jason Farago writes. “They almost appear to dance as you pass the museum’s four blocks of frontage, like illustrations in a zoetrope. They have an unexpected lightness that belies the steel, and the crunch and crush of their making."

Opening May 4, 2021, David Zwirner will present an exhibition of the artist's new large-scale sculptures at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location, marking her fifth solo presentation with the gallery. Featured in the exhibition will be seven vertically oriented works that elaborate on the artist’s ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” composed of various types of steel. These works––made of manipulated steel tubing, painted vibrant red-orange, combined with leaning, bent sheets of hot-rolled steel––envelop the viewer in an immersive presentation that considers the phenomenological experience of form and the surrounding spatial context. Bove’s new sculptures convey an apparent lightness that belies their materiality and monumental scale, and continue the artist’s engagement with the limits of physicality and perception.

Concurrently on view at the uptown gallery on East 69th Street will be an exhibition of new, smaller collage sculptures by the artist. Painted in colors ranging from muted lavender-gray to vibrant yellow, these works engage in different registers of display and scale than the presentation in Chelsea.

The Facade Commission: Carol Bove, The séances aren’t helping II

. The season launches on May 6 with a conversation between Los Angeles–based contemporary artist 

 and Charleston-based digital artist Michael Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple. Both have redefined the boundaries of their respective mediums: Wolfson with his provocative animatronic sculptures and Beeple with his NFT artworks, one of which recently sold for $69 million at Christie’s. Together, the pair discuss the parallels of the traditional and digital art worlds, questioning the calibration of aesthetic judgment—how it differs from medium to medium and, in turn, what makes someone a master of their craft.

New episodes will be released on a biweekly basis. Joining Lucas Zwirner as guest hosts this season will be gallery director Kyla McMillan and artist-writer Jarrett Earnest, curator of 

, currently on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street location in New York. This season they will be in conversation with voices including writer Rachel Kushner, artist Simphiwe Ndzube and novelist-poet-playwright Zakes Mda, artist Nayland Blake, artist Luc Tuymans and author Timothy Snyder, novelist Kate Zambreno, artist Lorraine O’Grady, perfumer Frederic Malle, and artist Marcel Dzama.

Still from an illustration by Tracy Ma, 2021

To be the First to Receive the Latest Episodes of Dialogues

With a Conversation between Jordan Wolfson and Beeple

Season 5 Launches this Week

Podcast Season 5 launch

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.