David Zwirner

HAROLD ANCART

Harold Ancart

Bad Weather, 2021

Oil stick and graphite on canvas mounted on panel in artist’s frame

Triptych
Overall: 96 1/2 x 326 inches (245.1 x 828 cm)
Each: 96 1/2 x 102 inches (245.1 x 259.1 cm)

Harold Ancart’s work depicts subjects that naturally invite contemplation, such as the horizon, clouds, flowers, flames, and architectural forms. Bad Weather, made in the first months of 2021, was Ancart’s second attempt to create an immersive, all-encompassing seascape, after The Sea (2020).

The painting’s palette of deep greens and pastels recalls Claude Monet’s triptychs Water Lilies (1914–1926) and Le Bassin aux Nymphéas (c. 1917–1920), seminal impressionist works in which reflections of the worlds above and beneath water swallow the viewer whole. Bad Weather is less rooted in a real landscape and instead engages with the landscape genre in a captivating scene of refusal and discord where the sky does not integrate the clouds and the sea does not integrate the sky.

“You get slaps of paint in the face everywhere you look. I like that very much: I wanted it to feel like that. I wanted you to be very much immersed by paint, by color.”
—Harold Ancart

CAROL BOVE

Carol Bove

Hardware Romance, 2021

Stainless steel

83 x 72 x 72 inches (210.8 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm)

Carol Bove is one of the foremost artists working today and has consistently challenged and expanded the possibilities of formal abstraction. The present work relates to the four monumental sculptures in her current site-specific artist commission for the storied facade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Here, Bove combines contorted, sandblasted stainless-steel tubing with a large five-foot-wide reflective disk, both of which rest on a low platform. Despite its materiality and scale, this unified form conveys a lightness and continues Bove’s commitment to pushing the limits of physicality and perception.

Installation view, Program, David Zwirner, New York, 2021, featuring works, from left, by Franz West, Sigmar Polke, Yayoi Kusama, and Harold Ancart

YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama

PUMPKIN, 2015

Stainless steel and purple urethane paint

58 x 56 1/8 x 55 1/8 inches (147.3 x 142.6 x 140 cm)

Yayoi Kusama’s work has transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: pop art and minimalism. While pumpkin shapes have appeared in her work since her early art studies in Japan, the form’s central importance was cemented by one of Kusama’s first open-air sculptures, Pumpkin (1994), which she created as a large-scale public commission on Naoshima Island in Japan.

This work belongs to a series of stainless-steel pumpkins featuring perforated dots that expose a brightly painted interior. The artist has described her fascination with the form: “Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood; they speak to me of the joy of living. They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.”

Installation view, Program, David Zwirner, New York, 2021, featuring works, from left, by Carol Bove, Yayoi Kusama, and Nate Lowman

“[Kusama's] conviction, manifest in the sculpted forms themselves, accounts for the unearthly brilliance of her objects.”
—Andrew Solomon, art critic

SIGMAR POLKE

Sigmar Polke

Mondlandschaft mit Schilf (Moonlit Landscape with Reeds), 1969

Dispersion on two (2) different types of fabric

59 x 49 inches (149.9 x 124.5 cm)
Framed: 63 1/4 x 53 1/2 inches (160.7 x 135.9 cm)

Sigmar Polke’s influential output engages unconventional materials and techniques as well as the use of ironic and humorous imagery as strategies of social, political, and aesthetic critique. This work is a key example of the artist’s Stoffbilder (or fabric paintings) and presents a nightscape reminiscent of stock travel photography.

Here, the artist has dripped household paint on found, commercially available strips of yellow satin and pink Lurex that he stitched together to create a tongue-in-cheek image of an exotic, moonlit horizon. The work plays on the traditions of German landscape painting and the idea of the Romantic sublime while commenting on the tourist imagery and advertising that was becoming increasingly common at the time.

Sigmar Polke, Mondlandschaft mit Schilf (Moonlit Landscape with Reeds), 1969 (detail)

FRANZ WEST

Franz West

Laube 2 (Arbor 2), 2003

Lacquered aluminum

89 1/4 x 115 x 129 inches (226.7 x 292.1 x 327.7 cm)

Emerging in the early 1970s, Franz West developed a unique aesthetic that engaged equally high and low reference points and often privileged social interaction as an intrinsic component of his work. He created objects that serve to redefine art as a social experience, calling attention to the way in which art is presented to the public.

In the early 2000s, the artist began expanding his outdoor sculptures into increasingly elaborate shapes. This work is characterized by a luminous pale chartreuse hue, and the looping, interwoven, and organic structure evokes the interplay of forms in nature. The open shape of the work both frames the landscape and invites physical engagement and interaction from viewers.

NATE LOWMAN

Nate Lowman

Stratovolcano (Merapi), 2021

Oil and alkyd on linen

84 x 120 inches (213.4 x 304.8 cm)

Nate Lowman mines mass-produced images culled from art history and popular media and transforms them into a diverse body of work that questions and revisits their intended meanings, creating new narratives in the process.

This work features a depiction of a found 2014 news photograph of an active volcano in Java, Indonesia, that has erupted regularly since 1548—including in 2021, when the artist revisited the image to make this painting. The canvas examines the tensions between painting and photography by combining the trope of landscape painting with an image rooted in photography.

Nate Lowman, Stratovolcano (Merapi), 2021 (detail)

NEO RAUCH

Neo Rauch

ROTAS, 2021

Oil on canvas

98 1/2 x 118 1/2 inches (250.2 x 301 cm)
Framed: 100 1/2 x 120 1/8 inches (255.3 x 305.1 cm)

Neo Rauch is widely celebrated for his visually captivating compositions, characterized by their distinctive combination of figurative imagery and surrealist abstraction. His compositions employ an eccentric iconography of human characters, animals, and hybrid forms within familiar-seeming but imaginary settings.

This work features groups of figures engaged in several tasks within a mysterious setting. The title, ROTAS, which means “wheel” in Latin, refers to the two merry-go-rounds in the foreground and background. The painting presents a dense allegory on the creative process, from the genesis of the artwork within the privacy of the studio to its debut in the public sphere.

Neo Rauch, ROTAS, 2021 (detail)

Installation view, Program, David Zwirner, New York, 2021, featuring works, from left, by Marlene Dumas and Alice Neel

MARLENE DUMAS

Marlene Dumas

Red Moon, 2007

Oil on linen

39 1/2 x 79 inches (100.3 x 200.7 cm)

Widely regarded as one of the most influential painters working today, Marlene Dumas has continuously probed the complexities of identity and representation in her work. Red Moon reflects the artist’s long-standing interest in mortality, art history, and art-historical representations of mortality.

The work is based on John Everett Millais’s depiction of Ophelia (1851–1852), which represents the scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Ophelia drowns herself after her father is murdered by her lover. While Millais’s work depicts the famous literary death, Dumas’s Red Moon leaves the condition of the female figure more ambiguous.

Marlene Dumas, Red Moon, 2007 (detail)

“Dumas [articulates] her practice as a visual accounting of our time through the representation of individuals or, rather, of bodies and souls as they move through the incidents of life, politics, and art.”

—Cornelia Butler, chief curator of the Hammer Museum

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–1852 (detail). Tate

ALICE NEEL

Alice Neel

Sue Seely, Nude, 1943

Oil on canvas

30 3/8 x 48 1/4 inches (77.2 x 122.6 cm)
Framed: 33 5/8 x 51 1/2 inches (85.4 x 130.8 cm)

Over the course of seven decades, Alice Neel developed her signature approach to the human body, creating daringly honest portraits of her family, friends, neighbors, art world colleagues, writers, poets, artists, actors, activists, and more. Neel’s ability to depict those around her with unfazed accuracy, honesty, and compassion displays itself throughout her canvases.

From an early age, Neel was interested in the visual trope of nudity, a subject that at the time was not considered appropriate for a female artist to pursue but today features powerfully in her current retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. As in other significant female nudes by Neel, Sue Seely, Nude shows a woman in a languishing, reclining pose, gazing at the viewer in a manner that is at once sensual and direct, depicting the subject in all her complexity as an individual.

Alice Neel, Sue Seely, Nude, 1943 (detail)

Installation view, Program, David Zwirner, New York, 2021, featuring works, from left, by Lisa Yuskavage and Dana Schutz

LISA YUSKAVAGE

Lisa Yuskavage

Master Class, 2021

Oil on linen

84 x 72 inches (213.4 x 182.9 cm)

Lisa Yuskavage challenges and expands the parameters of painting and portraiture through a singular blend of traditional and contemporary techniques and ideas with a unique treatment of color and figuration.

This painting, entitled Master Class, features a studio space awash in luminous electric green tones with two figures rendered in distinct palettes. The cool tones that make up the man’s naked body contrast with the warm pinkish hues of his female counterpart, complicating and undermining the conventional power dynamics that traditionally exist between artist and muse, student and master.

DANA SCHUTZ

Dana Schutz

Day Drawing, 2020

Oil on canvas

78 x 69 1/2 inches (198.1 x 176.5 cm)

Dana Schutz is known for complex visual narratives that convey emotions, psychological states, and subjective experiences. In Day Drawing, Schutz presents an invented world featuring a woman and abstract sculptural figure on the beach.

They are vaguely dressed the same, as if reflections of one another. While the woman traces the figure’s shadow, which loosely resembles a continent, the figure appears as a weary muse or caught in mid-stride. Proceeds from this painting will benefit The Metropolitan Opera.

TOBA KHEDOORI

Toba Khedoori

Untitled, 2020

Oil on canvas

28 x 63 3/4 inches (71.1 x 161.9 cm)

Toba Khedoori is known for precisely rendered, intricate works that depict familiar objects as well as scenes from nature. This painting is based on an inverted photograph of war-torn eastern Ghouta in Syria and depicts a succession of buildings with partially collapsed structures.

By inverting the tonal values of the source image, the shadowy interiors of the buildings are made blindingly bright, highlighting the eeriness of their seeming vacancy. Khedoori’s work often proceeds by means of subtle or discreet shifts in the representation of an image, so as to turn a common scene uncanny. Her precise estrangement of source material invites the viewer to look more closely, whether at the familiar outline of a chair or the tragically commonplace image of a shelled city.

“Khedoori’s art isn’t displaced from history; rather it participates in a history itself marked by displacements.”
—Lane Relyea, art historian

FRANCIS ALŸS

Francis Alÿs

Untitled, 1995

Diptych
Overall dimensions variable
Part 1 (Francis Alÿs):
Oil on wood panel
4 x 5 3/8 inches (10.2 x 13.7 cm)
Part 2 (Emilio Rivera):
Enamel on metal sheet
21 3/8 x 27 3/4 inches (54.3 x 70.5 cm)

Francis Alÿs is known for in-depth projects that are based on observations of, and engagements with, everyday life. This two-part work is part of the artist’s Sign Painting Project, begun in 1993; he starts by making small-scale figurative paintings in the style of the painted commercial advertisements in his neighborhood in Mexico City.

In a collaborative process with local sign-painting workshops, or rotulistas, Alÿs commissions the painters responsible for the ads to create enlarged copies of his paintings in their glossy, professional style. He then builds on the work in a new painting that incorporates the most significant elements of the commission, ultimately challenging the conventions of painting and traditional notions of authorship.

Francis Alÿs, Untitled, 1995 (detail)

BARBARA KRUGER

Barbara Kruger

Untitled (Can money buy you love?), 2011

Archival pigment print

32 x 50 inches (81.3 x 127 cm)
Framed: 33 1/8 x 51 1/8 inches (84 x 129.8 cm)

Barbara Kruger consistently engages with images and language as tools of communication, repurposing them to create works that question established power structures and social constructs.

These prints are part of a series of ten works Kruger made in 2011, each presenting text in the same font with distinct graphic backgrounds and addressing a different question to the viewer. The series exemplifies the approach to image and text that has remained consistent throughout her influential career.

Barbara Kruger

Untitled (Is there a perfect mate for everyone?), 2011

Archival pigment print

32 x 50 inches (81.3 x 127 cm)
Framed: 33 1/8 x 51 1/8 inches (84 x 129.8 cm)

“Kruger juxtaposes two kinds of language—the direct address of advertising and propaganda, and the reflective and questioning language of philosophy.”
—Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

SHERRIE LEVINE

Sherrie Levine

Pink SMEG Refrigerator and Renoir Nudes, 2016

Three (3) oil on mahogany paintings and one (1) SMEG FAB28UBLR1 50s Retro Style refrigerator

70 x 111 x 27 1/2 inches (177.8 x 281.9 x 69.9 cm)

Sherrie Levine’s practice challenges notions of originality, authenticity, and identity. Through works that are explicitly appropriated from the modernist canon, and others that are more general in their references, she critiques our traditional understanding of art history and visual culture.

This installation pairs a sequence of three monochrome paintings with a retro-style SMEG refrigerator. Deriving the colors of these paintings from nudes by Auguste Renoir, Levine creates abstract restatements of the impressionist originals. The accompanying refrigerator, with its distinct curved form, becomes a figurative stand-in for both the French painter’s subjects and the viewer in their bodily scale.

Installation view, Program, David Zwirner, New York, 2021, featuring works, from left, by Toba Khedoori and Sherrie Levine

“Levine trades in the field of representation, showing that the signifying power of the subject cannot be held apart from the logic of the commodity.”

—Alex Kitnick, art critic

Auguste Renoir, Nude on a Couch, 1915. Tate

JOSEF ALBERS

Josef Albers

Study for Homage to the Square: Tranquil, 1967

Oil on Masonite

32 x 32 inches (81.3 x 81.3 cm)
Framed: 32 1/2 x 32 1/2 inches (82.6 x 82.6 cm)

One of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century, Josef Albers bridged European and American modernism through a tightly focused investigation into the perceptual properties of color and spatial relationships. In 1950, the artist began his seminal Homage to the Square series, which he elaborated on until his death in 1976.

These works were based on a nested square format that allowed him to experiment with endless color combinations and perceptual effects. The artist has written about the juxtaposition of colors in his paintings to “challenge or to echo each other, to support or to oppose one another” in order to “make obvious how colors influence and change each other.”

Installation view, Program, David Zwirner, New York, 2021, featuring works, from left, by Josef Albers and Ruth Asawa

“In the fixed composition of the Homages, Albers used color to create movement, a sense of temporal unfolding: the paintings seem to change, the colors to shift.”
—Jeannette Redensek, art historian

RUTH ASAWA

Ruth Asawa is known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form. She began making her signature looped-wire sculptures in the late 1940s as a student at Black Mountain College and went on to execute them in a number of complex, interwoven configurations.

This work is made from a single continuous line of looped wire—emphasizing the artist’s acuity in achieving a clarity of form from relatively modest means. It was included in the artist’s 1958 solo exhibition at the prestigious Peridot Gallery in New York and was subsequently owned by the gallery’s proprietor, Louis Pollack, and his wife, Laura.

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (S.692, Hanging Five-Lobed, Single-Layered Continuous Form), c. 1958

Hanging sculpture—nickel-plated wire

77 x 12 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches (195.6 x 31.1 x 31.1 cm)

“Using a single rhetorical gesture—either looping or dividing—Asawa invents myriad variations of forms that seem to interlock, visually attaching themselves to each other through the interplay of their shapes and shadows.”

—Daniell Cornell, art historian

Ruth Asawa kneeling behind a hanging looped-wire sculpture, 1957 (detail). Photo by Imogen Cunningham © Imogen Cunningham Trust. Artwork © The Estate of Ruth Asawa / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ROY DECARAVA

Roy DeCarava

Catsup bottles, table and coat, 1952

Silver gelatin print

Print: 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (41.6 x 51.8 cm)

Over the course of six decades, Roy DeCarava produced a singular collection of black-and-white photographs of modern American life that combine formal mastery with an intimate and deeply human treatment of his subject matter.

DeCarava’s pioneering work privileged the aesthetic qualities of the medium, carrying the ability to reach the viewer as a counterpoint to the view of photography as mere chronicle or document and helping it to gain acceptance as an art form in its own right.

Roy DeCarava

Coltrane #24, 1961

Silver gelatin print

Print: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 20 3/8 x 16 3/8 inches (51.8 x 41.6 cm)

Roy DeCarava

Streets for people, Washington, D.C., 1975

Silver gelatin print

Print: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 20 3/8 x 16 3/8 inches (51.8 x 41.6 cm)

STAN DOUGLAS

Stan Douglas

22 April 1924, 2021

Digital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum

68 x 118 1/2 inches (172.7 x 301 cm)

Since the late 1980s, photography has been a crucial component of Stan Douglas’s practice. This work is part of his 2020–2021 project Penn Station’s Half Century, an expansive investigation into how history manifests in specific places and moments, and Douglas’s most ambitious exploration of the medium to date.

Commissioned for New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall, this body of work reimagines the life of the original Penn Station from the time of its inauguration in 1910 to its eventual demolition in 1963. Douglas captured nine historical scenes over a four-day shoot, during which more than four hundred actors were scanned and re-dressed in unique period costumes before being stitched into digitally composited, historically accurate re-creations of the building, all rendered by a Hollywood visual effects studio.

Installation view, Stan Douglas, Penn Station’s Half Century, 2020. Commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund for Moynihan Train Hall. Photo by Nicholas Knight

NEW YORK

HAROLD ANCART

Harold Ancart

CAROL BOVE

Carol Bove

YAYOI KUSAMA

Yayoi Kusama

SIGMAR POLKE

Sigmar Polke

FRANZ WEST

Franz West

NATE LOWMAN

Nate Lowman

NEO RAUCH

Neo Rauch

MARLENE DUMAS

Marlene Dumas

ALICE NEEL

Alice Neel

LISA YUSKAVAGE

Lisa Yuskavage

DANA SCHUTZ

Dana Schutz

TOBA KHEDOORI

Toba Khedoori

FRANCIS ALŸS

Francis Alÿs

BARBARA KRUGER

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger

SHERRIE LEVINE

Sherrie Levine

“Levine trades in the field of representation, showing that the signifying power of the subject cannot be held apart from the logic of the commodity.”

JOSEF ALBERS

Josef Albers

RUTH ASAWA

Ruth Asawa

ROY DECARAVA

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava

STAN DOUGLAS

Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas