Joan Mitchell @ David Zwirner, NYC - 'To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965' Exhibition Curated by Sarah Roberts

To define a feeling 

Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965 

Curated by Sarah Roberts 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 — December 13, 2025 

Joan Mitchell 

Untitled, c. 1963 

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.

—Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) that focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. Capping off a yearlong celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this presentation is curated by Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and brings together a significant group of works from public and private collections, as well as that of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. 

During these years, Joan Mitchell spent many weeks each summer and fall living on a sailboat and exploring the Mediterranean from a home base along France’s Côte d’Azur with her companion, painter Jean Paul Riopelle, and her works from this period are inflected by these voyages and the sites of the Mediterranean. Back in her Parisian studio, Mitchell drew on the experience of looking out at the water, horizon, and rocky coasts, resulting in paintings that depart radically from those of the preceding years, and are distinct from those that would follow. Characterized by dark, central masses of swirling brushstrokes in deep greens and blues partially obscuring rich tonal colors embedded beneath, these turbulent canvases exchange the grounding armature that had structured much of her previous landscape-inspired work for more experimental compositional strategies. Constituting, as the poet John Ashbery described, “an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air,” the profound, dramatic works on view offer insight into Mitchell’s distinctive process in evolving the structural and chromatic composition of her paintings, while dynamically engaging many of the key themes and motifs that extend throughout her oeuvre.

As Sarah Roberts notes of the exhibition:

For Joan Mitchell, abstract painting had a singular capacity to capture and communicate multiple layers of human experience—things seen, touched, felt, and remembered—in a single visual field. From 1960 to 1965, her days and nights included frequent Mediterranean sailing trips to Corsica and Italy with her partner Jean Paul Riopelle, time spent reading and discussing poetry with friends, deep thinking about painting, and keenly felt losses of loved ones, as well the assassination of John F. Kennedy and growing social unrest in both the US and France. Reflecting on this tumultuous period later in life, Mitchell named all these events as impacting the direction of her work. Never seeking to create direct representations of particular moments or to simply channel a single emotion or thought, she sought instead to render in paint something new that articulated the sum of experiences in all their complexity and ambiguity—to define a feeling.

The selection of paintings and drawings gathered here shows Mitchell at work from 1960 to 1965, responding to the sea’s expanse and surrounding landscapes, and generating fresh ideas about painting itself. Central masses of densely applied paint in somber tones began to emerge in her canvases in 1960. By 1962, she had narrowed the range of hues to the darkest greens, browns, and blues, colors so deep that this group of works has frequently been referred to as the “black paintings,” though true black was rarely included. Mitchell concentrated her swirling central masses into floating islands of color within subtly varied, off-white fields. Within just two years, she would shift again, opening the concentrations into constellations of loose, squared forms and tangled brushwork as she continually experimented.

Reflecting on recent work in her 1965 oral history with art historian Dorothy Seckler, Mitchell noted, “Clement Greenberg said there never should be a central image, so I decided to make one.” With this body of work, Mitchell also patently challenged prevailing conventions of balanced composition and harmonious color, choosing an enigmatic palette with flashes of sharp contrast, shifting her “central” forms slightly off axis, and playing with backgrounds and corners. Echoes of Mediterranean light and rocky, shrub-studded coastlines were met with the turbulence and toughness in her painting technique, giving rise to one of Mitchell’s most daring, moody, and probing bodies of work.

Highlights from the exhibition include Mandres, c. 1962 (Private Collection, courtesy of McClain Gallery), an important transitional work that shows Mitchell beginning to experiment with central forms; Untitled, 1963 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an expansive triptych characteristic of Mitchell’s growing engagement with multi-panel works during this period; as well as a selection of small-scale paintings that were inspired by stations on the Paris Metro and debuted in her 1965 solo exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, including one on loan from the Hofstra University Museum of Art. Also on view are several large-scale paintings from the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation that span these years, as well as a grouping of rarely seen works on paper made using charcoal and crayon—sometimes in combination with watercolor—that extend Mitchell’s exploration of form and color in a different medium.

The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of primary materials from the archives of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. A fully illustrated catalogue with new scholarship on this period by Sarah Roberts and other authors is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books.

Artist Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.

Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1949 and was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Joan Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to help them develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

In 1951, Joan Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991). The Joan Mitchell Foundation was previously represented by Cheim & Read, New York, where the artist’s work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, in 1997, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, and 2018.

Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).

In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions held at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).

A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art the following year. The exhibition was subsequently presented at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through 2023, where the complementary exhibition, Monet – Mitchell, was also on view. The Saint Louis Art Museum presented an adaptation of Monet – Mitchell in 2023, featuring eight works by Mitchell and two by Monet.

Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nakanoshima Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Portia Zvavahera @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Zvibereko zvemweya wangu' Exhibition

Portia Zvavahera

Zvibereko zvemweya wangu

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

November 14, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Portia Zvavahera

Takasunungurwa, 2025 

© Portia Zvavahera. Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, its third solo exhibition with the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera. Taking place at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles, this presentation features a series of new works that continues to develop Zvavahera’s experiments with different painting processes and subject matter by joining her carefully charted dream worlds with her lived experience and daily rituals. Portia Zvavahera expands her practice with familiar motifs and narratives; her works are populated by symbolic creatures that become powerful conduits for the interpretation of spiritual visions and the contemplation of our earthly existence. 

In her paintings, Portia Zvavahera gives form to emotions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

Zvavahera’s latest exhibition powerfully continues this exploration of the human condition. Themes of love, loss, fear, family, and protection recur throughout this new series of paintings, mirroring her broader practice. The show title Zvibereko zvemweya wangu loosely translates from Shona as the “fruits of my soul,” aptly describing the intense creative output behind these works. These monumental paintings are among her most energetic to date, deeply inspired by her love for family and, particularly, the passing of her late grandmother. Here, Portia Zvavahera resumes her study of dreamscapes, delving into subject matter that women, especially mothers, have experienced across time. She strips away the protective veneer of modern society, exposing core emotions that relate to the profundity of life and death. Incorporating new motifs like vessels, trees, water lilies, and snakes, Zvavahera’s paintings guide viewers on journeys, telling abstracted stories about the strength within the maternal and matriarchal world, where reality and imagination merge.

Shona is the artist’s native language, which she speaks at home; titles in Shona are provided with a translation only when Portia Zvavahera feels that the English words suffice. Experimenting with batik and block printing, oil sticks, and acrylic paints, Zvavahera's canvases are applied with layers, and then, like dreams, unfold into camouflaged compositions rich in symbolism and psychological depth. Within Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, Portia Zvavahera portrays small figures, children unbound by the canvas and surrounded by protecting arms and feathered veils painted with leaves, using a traditional wax-resist batik method, in works such as Kubuditswa muhari (2025). Others like Kubudiswa (redeemed) (2025) show a series of bowing figures—a community seemingly praying as a form of collective strength, demonstrating their power in numbers.

Artist Portia Zvavahera

Portia Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2005. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

Portia Ndakaoneswa murima, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York and her second with the gallery, was on view at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021. Zvavahera’s first exhibition with the gallery, Ndakavata pasi ndikamutswa nekuti anonditsigira, was at its London location in 2020.

The artist has presented several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014–2020), and a solo exhibition with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, held her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She was invited to show her work as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale.

In 2024, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, England, presented Portia Zvakazarurwa, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized in collaboration with Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where the show traveled in 2025. Curated by Tamar Garb, this exhibition marked Zvavahera’s first solo institutional presentation in the United Kingdom. Also in 2024, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, presented Imba yerumbidzo (House of praise), as the fifteenth iteration of its Open Space solo exhibition series. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika, Zvavahera's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, in August 2025. The artist also opened her first solo institutional exhibition in Germany at Fridericianum, Kassel, on September 27, 2025.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

R. Crumb @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Tales of Paranoia' Exhibition

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

October 10, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Panel from R. Crumb, I'm Afraid, 2025

© Robert Crumb, 2025 

Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new drawings and prints by iconic illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb (b. 1943), on view at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. In his works of the last several years Crumb reflects on life in his eighties and his sixty-year career as well as themes of personal and mass paranoia during these times of social and political unrest. Crumb’s most mordant attacks are, as always, reserved for himself and show him contending with his own manic anxieties in a humorous and insightful manner.

The new works in this exhibition represent Crumb’s first extensive solo comic work in over two decades, marking an impressive late-career resurgence. Many of these incisive, introspective, and formally adventurous illustrations were made for the artist’s publication, Tales of Paranoia. This new comic book—Crumb’s first in twenty-three years—was published this month by Fantagraphics. Created in the wake of the 2022 passing of Crumb’s wife and longtime artistic partner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, these works reveal a mind turning inward without its usual counterpoint—absent her grounding presence, the work veers further into obsessive, unfiltered reflection. As Crumb noted in 2019, “Success and the love of real women helped me a lot. Aline really saved my dismal ass.” [1] Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb had frequently collaborated, particularly in the decade preceding her death, and her absence is felt directly in the content of these recent works.

While Crumb’s early work skewered both mainstream and countercultural figures with a hyper-libidinal, satirical edge, his recent drawings meditate on paranoia, particularly around medicine and disease. These works convey a heightened self-awareness, oscillating between genuine suspicion and conspiracy; they incisively mirror a broader culture of mistrust of authority and the erosion of shared meaning and reliable information in the world today. In A Difficult Conundrum (2025), each panel depicts an increasingly agitated Crumb, his speech bubbles multiplying in a spiraling monologue directed against a pharmaceutical company. Through the familiar conventions of the comic form, Crumb constructs a self-portrait steeped in uncertainty and vulnerability. In other works he revisits his past, exploring difficult and disturbing moments that continue to affect him. As the title suggests, The Very Worst LSD I Ever Had (2025) documents a harrowing acid trip that Crumb experienced in 1966, which led him to seek several sessions of regressive hypnosis.

Also on view is a rare sketchbook from earlier in Crumb’s career, which offers an intimate glimpse into Crumb’s process and preoccupations. Placed in dialogue with the recent drawings, it highlights not only the evolution of the artist’s style and tone but also the enduring idiosyncrasies—formal, psychological, and narrative—that continue to define his work. Numerous recent etchings Crumb produced in collaboration with the renowned print studio Two Palms, New York, are also featured.

Artist R. Crumb

Born in Philadelphia, R. Crumb (b. 1943) moved to the dynamic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1967, and relocated in 1991 to the south of France, where he currently lives and works. Crumb joined David Zwirner in 2006. This is Crumb’s seventh solo exhibition with the David Zwirner gallery.

Solo exhibitions of Crumb’s work were presented at the Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Mansfield (2020), and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California (2018). In 2016, the Cartoonmuseum Basel organized Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn Together, the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artists’ joint work. A retrospective of Crumb’s work was held in 2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2011, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators, New York. A major solo show devoted to Crumb’s work was organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 2007, and traveled from 2008 to 2009 to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; and the Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California. Other solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, a show that traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (both 2005); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2004). Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb was named the best film of 1994 by the late critic Gene Siskel and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995

Work by the artist is represented in major museum collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; Musée régional d'art contemporain Occitanie, Sérignan, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[1] Nadja Sayej, “Robert Crumb: ‘I am no longer a slave to a raging libido’,” The Guardian, March 7, 2019. Accessed online.

DAVID ZWIRNER, LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket @ David Zwirner, NYC + Los Angeles

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 – December 19, 2025 

Luc Tuymans

The Family, 2025

© Luc Tuymans. All rights reserved

Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans on view at the gallery’s newly renovated 533 West 19th Street location. Luc Tuymans has been represented by David Zwirner since 1994; this is the celebrated artist’s eighteenth solo show with the gallery. The Fruit Basket will travel to David Zwirner Los Angeles in February 2026.

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Featuring subject matter that ranges from the mundane to the profound, the artist’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. Over time, Luc Tuymans has adapted both the content and formal construction of his works to engage with contemporary visual culture and the sociopolitical contexts in which they are shown, thereby continually asserting the relevance of painting in a digitally saturated world.

Thematically, The Fruit Basket picks up where Tuymans’s previous exhibition—The Barn, held at David Zwirner New York in 2023—left off, delving further into the deleterious effects of the conflation of image and reality. The exhibition considers the pervasive atmosphere of fracture that is specific to the United States at this moment. Foregrounding the highly mediated state of contemporary experience, Luc Tuymans reinforces a growing sense of dissolution through varied subject matter and formal approaches, which are installed in an unexpected cadence across the show. Throughout, he modulates the tonality of his colors to match the heightened artifi ciality of the imagery he has carefully chosen, creating thought-provoking juxtapositions of scale and technique. 

Measuring sixteen feet tall and more than twenty-three feet wide, The Fruit Basket (2025)—from which the exhibition takes its title—presents a picture that is literally fragmented, composed of nine distinct parts arranged into a grid. Based on an iPhone photo that Luc Tuymans took of an actual basket of fermenting fruit projected onto a blue-cast multipart screen, the eerie tones and diffuse focus of this painting betray the presence of digital light. An object of fascination for the artist, the fruit basket—sometimes seen as a symbol of plenty—and its contents are distorted almost beyond recognition, becoming something else entirely, a kind of memento mori. Due to the sheer size of the composition, the viewer must step back to take in the work in full, only to notice the intrusion of the artist’s fingers at the bottom corner that indexes his engagement with the image on his phone. The strong diagonal that cuts across the picture plane mimics the construction of the similarly scaled epic history painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault. In likening a fruit basket—an object that is also commonly gifted to the sick—to Géricault’s raft of the dying, adrift from a shipwreck, Luc Tuymans emphasizes decay rather than abundance. 

A related group of four large-scale works, collectively titled Illumination, is installed throughout the show, appearing at first as fields of color that are lit from within in a manner akin to the rectilinear abstractions of Mark Rothko—a prodigious artist whose life ended in tragedy, and an ongoing interest for Tuymans. Tuymans’s paintings harken back to 1950s and 1960s abstract expressionism and color field painting, non-referential styles that had their heyday during a period of intense sociopolitical turmoil in the US and are now the subject of renewed interest. In contrast to the spontaneity of abstract painting, Tuymans’s works are deliberately constructed, based on zoomed-in stills captured on his phone from a documentary about the restoration of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. Luc Tuymans decided to encase these compositions in nearly black hues (though using no actual black pigment), applied by hand in thick bands around their borders. These off-square “frames” occupy almost as large a portion of the canvas as the actual image, further emphasizing the light that these colorful passages seem to emit—in this case reproducing the bright and mottled light that artifi cially results from taking a photo of a screen with a smartphone and drastically enlarging it. The subject of these paintings is amorphous, opening onto multiple readings that signal the instability of memory and the ways in which the past can be reinvented through image. 

Another group of canvases, painted in Tuymans’s distinctive and recognizable style, literalizes a feeling of intrusion at the heart of the exhibition. Hollow (2025) features the empty interior of a prosthetic latex mask, which floats against a dark, monochromatic ground. The inverse of a face, this image foregrounds the question of what is real and what is fake. Meanwhile, the smallest work in the show, The Maggot (2025) presents a close-up of the titular insect, alternately considered a harbinger of decay and rot and a medical cure capable of cleansing an open wound. Migrants (2025) glows urgently with hot reds and oranges and a looser treatment of paint. Rendered in an impressionistic style that is legible only from a distance, the image of dozens of faceless figures cloaked in shadow derives from a news photograph of migrants waiting at a border—the only work in the show to be based on an unmanipulated, “real” image. 

Finally, a group of four canvases based on 3D-printed figurines of actual people feature individuals that in different ways read as quintessentially American. Appearing at once uncannily lifelike and frozen in time, the people are rendered with an increased feeling of dimensionality, hinting at their status as objects. Executed on a more intimate scale that brings the viewer face-to-face with the subjects depicted, these paintings are meant to project optimism. However, Luc Tuymans has bestowed the canvases with an ashen underlayer, coupled with a thin treatment of paint, causing the figures to appear as if they were never alive to begin with. Paintings from this group both open and close the exhibition. In the first gallery, Hall of Fame (2025) features a figure donning the yellow NFL Hall of Fame jacket and holding a football between his hands as he stares vacantly ahead, a champion of the most American of pastimes. Likewise, the last painting in the show, The Family (2025) features a group portrait of three generations clustered together, smiling brightly while receding before our very eyes, underscoring the impossibility of a certain kind of reality.

Artist Luc Tuymans

Born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium, Luc Tuymans is one of the most important painters of his generation. His first major museum presentations were held in 1990 at the Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend, Belgium, and the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent. In 1992, the artist participated in Documenta IX in Kassel, in addition to having a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, which helped cement his growing reputation in Europe. In 1994, Luc Tuymans: Superstition debuted at Portikus, Frankfurt, and traveled to David Zwirner, New York; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, establishing him as a major influential artist abroad. In 2001, the artist represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale to great acclaim. Luc Tuymans lives and works in Antwerp. 

One of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, Luc Tuymans has had numerous solo exhibitions at the gallery since joining its roster in 1994. In May 2023, David Zwirner presented The Barn, a solo exhibition of Tuymans’s work, at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. This was the artist’s seventeenth show with the gallery and his first solo presentation in the United States since 2016. Previous shows at David Zwirner include Eternity (2022); Monkey Business (2021); Good Luck (2020); Le Mépris (2016); The Shore (2015); The Summer is Over (2013); Allo! (2012); Corporate (2010); Forever, The Management of Magic (2008); Proper (2005); Fortune (2003); Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man (2000); Security (1998); The Heritage (1996); Francis Picabia and Luc Tuymans: Paintings (1995); and Superstition (1994). 

Luc Tuymans has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide. An in-situ temporary mural by the artist, L’Orphelin, was on view at the Rotunda Valentin de Boulogne in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in 2024–2025. In 2024, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presented The Past, a major exhibition of the artist's work. Other solo presentations include those held at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2019); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2019); Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp (2016), which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq, Doha (2015); Menil Collection, Houston (2013); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2009), which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and Tate Modern, London (2004), which traveled to K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The artist has received numerous awards and honors, including the Medal of Honor, International Congress of Contemporary Painting (ICOCEP), Porto, Portugal (2019); the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Zurich (2000); and the Flemish Culture Award for Visual Arts (1993). His works are featured in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Pinault Collection, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, United Kingdom. 

Luc Tuymans’s catalogue raisonné of paintings, from 1972 to 2018, is available from David Zwirner Books and Yale University Press. The three volumes feature full-color images and documentation of more than five hundred paintings.

DAVID ZWIRNER

533 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Gerhard Richter @ Galerie David Zwirner, Paris - Exposition + Biographie

Gerhard Richter

Galerie David Zwirner, Paris

20 octobre - 20 décembre 2025

David Zwirner présente dans sa Galerie de Paris une sélection de peintures, dessins et installations de miroirs de Gerhard Richter. L’exposition marque la troisième collaboration du célèbre artiste allemand avec la Galerie depuis l’annonce de sa représentation en 2023. Elle fait suite aux expositions monographiques tenues à New York (2023) et à Londres (2024), et coïncide avec une rétrospective d’envergure s’ouvrant le 17 octobre 2025 à la Fondation Louis Vuitton à Paris, sous le commissariat de Nicholas Serota et Dieter Schwarz.

Gerhard Richter

Kl. Badende (Petite baigneuse), 1994

© Gerhard Richter 2025 (20102025) 

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Gerhard Richter

Blumen, (Fleurs), 1992

Oil on canvas

© Gerhard Richter 2025 (20102025) 

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Les oeuvres présentées chez David Zwirner témoignent de l’impressionnante diversité d’enjeux, d’échelles et de techniques que mobilise l’artiste dans son travail. Prises dans leur ensemble, elles mettent en lumière sa profonde compréhension du médium pictural et l’enquête sans cesse renouvelée qu’il mène autour du fait même de créer une oeuvre. Dans ses Fotobilder (Photo-peintures) – par exemple Blumen (Fleurs, 1992), Torso (Torse, 1997) ou Kl. Badende (Petite baigneuse, 1994) –, l’artiste utilise ses propres photographies comme point de départ, mais aussi des images trouvées au hasard de journaux, magazines ou publicités. Souvent, l’artiste floute ou dénature d’une façon ou d’une autre l’image qui résulte de ce travail de composition, rendant plus complexe encore la relation qui unit la photographie à la peinture : une expérience conceptuelle se joue dans ces transpositions itératives entre les deux médiums.

Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild (Tableau abstrait), 2001

Oil on alu dibond

© Gerhard Richter 2025 (20102025)

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Gerhard Richter

Abstraktes Bild (Tableau abstrait), 2001

Oil on alu dibond

© Gerhard Richter 2025 (20102025)

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Avec la série des Abstrakte Bilder (Tableaux abstraits), Gerhard Richter explore le potentiel formel et conceptuel de la peinture sous un autre angle. Exécutées selon des principes de composition extrêmement rigoureux, ces oeuvres ont recours à l’abstraction pour mettre en exergue la matérialité de la peinture et de la couleur – une méthode de création à la fois aléatoire et planifi ée avec soin. Deux Tableaux abstraits datant de 2001 sont exposés, marbrés de peinture verte, rose vif ou jaune d’or se déployant harmonieusement sur toute la surface de la toile. Les deux oeuvres contrastent ainsi avec les dernières peintures à l’huile réalisées par l’artiste de 2015 à 2017, qui se caractérisent au contraire par des entrelacs complexes où la superposition de lignes et de touches appliquées avec vigueur créent une impression de relief. Ces peintures sont confrontées à Strip, tableau de 2024 s’étirant sur quatre mètres de largeur. Revisitant ses Tableaux abstraits grâce aux technologies numériques, Gerhard Richter orchestre dans la série des Strips un dialogue entre la peinture, la photographie, la reproduction d’images par impression et l’abstraction.

Des dessins récents de l’artiste figurent aussi dans l’exposition ; certains totalement inédits et d’autres ayant été présentés plus tôt cette année dans le cadre de Gerhard Richter: 81 Zeichnungen, 1 Strip-Bild, 1 Edition à la Staatliche Graphische Sammlung de Munich. Gerhard Richter a toujours accordé une place importante au médium du dessin dans sa pratique artistique, et le passage des années n’a pas démenti cet engagement fructueux. Les oeuvres présentées, incorporant souvent des encres de couleur et du crayon à mine de graphite, lui permettent d’explorer une autre dimension du rôle de la main de l’artiste dans le processus menant à la création d’un « récit » pictural abstrait mais dynamique.

L’exposition à Paris comprend également trois installations de surfaces réfl échissantes montées au mur, de tailles différentes, ainsi que 3 Scheiben (3 Panneaux de verre, 2023), où trois pans de verre transparent et réfl échissant sont dressés au sein d’un cadre en métal. Depuis 1967 et la création de son installation 4 Glasscheiben (4 Panneaux de verre), qui a marqué un tournant dans sa carrière, Gerhard Richter nourrit un grand intérêt analytique – qui confine à la fascination – pour le verre. De façon très personnelle, il mobilise ce matériau moins comme un élément de sculpture pure que comme une « réflexion », dans les deux sens du terme, de son investigation de la peinture et de la création d’image. Contempler ces oeuvres – et donc aussi les images qui se forment à leur surface – est une expérience radicalement paradoxale où la réalité, répliquée par le miroir de manière forcément fi dèle au monde réel qui entoure nécessairement l’oeuvre, devient pourtant inaccessible en tant que refl et, à la fois hors de portée et déformée. 

Dans les oeuvres en verre de Gerhard Richter, comme le soulignent Janice Bretz et Kerstin Küster, « les visiteurs ne restent pas spectateurs mais deviennent eux-mêmes créateurs ; ils se confrontent à l’écart entre l’espace d’exposition réel et le refl et aléatoire de la réalité sur le verre. […] L’artiste nous invite à réfl échir au fait même de voir et à considérer ce que l’on voit comme une seule réalité potentielle parmi de nombreuses autres. Voir est contextuel : la réalité dépend toujours de celui qui regarde ». – Janice Bretz and Kerstin Küster, “Transparent and Reflected: Mirrors, Glass, and Strips,” in Gerhard Richter: Abstraction. Exh. cat. (Potsdam: Museum Barberini, 2020), p. 198.

Artiste Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter est né en 1932 à Dresde en Allemagne. Il étudie les beaux-arts de 1951 à 1956 à la Hochschule für Bildende Künste de Dresde et se spécialise en peinture murale. En 1959, il visite la documenta II qui se tient à Cassel, alors en Allemagne de l’Ouest : une expérience fondatrice qui le mène à infl échir sa trajectoire artistique. Après avoir réussi à fuir l’Allemagne de l’Est en 1961, il entreprend un second cycle d’études à la Staatliche Kunstakademie de Düsseldorf. Il y cofonde un mouvement éphémère appelé « réalisme capitaliste » avec ses condisciples Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg (qui deviendra galeriste, plus connu sous le nom de Konrad Fischer) et Manfred Kuttner.

À partir de 1964, son travail fait l’objet de nombreuses expositions personnelles dans des galeries et musées du le monde entier. Sa première exposition monographique dans une institution publique se tient en 1969 au Gegenverkehr du Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst d’Aachen, en Allemagne de l’Ouest. En 1972, il est choisi pour représenter l’Allemagne à la Biennale de Venise, où il investit le pavillon national de ses seules oeuvres. Il est aussi l’artiste ayant présenté son travail le plus grand nombre de fois à la documenta (en 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2007 et 2017). Le travail de Gerhard Richter a été montré tout autour du monde au fi l de nombreuses rétrospectives et expositions monographiques au sein d’institutions de premier plan, parmi lesquelles le Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen à Düsseldorf (1971, 1986), la Kunsthalle de Brême en Allemagne de l’Ouest (1975), le Centre Pompidou à Paris (1977, 2012), la Städtische Kunsthalle de Düsseldorf (1986), la Neue Nationalgalerie de Berlin (1986, 2012), le Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden à Washington D.C. (1988, 2003), le San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1989, 2002), la Tate à Londres (1991, 2011), le Moderna Museet à Stockholm (1993), l’Art Institute de Chicago (2002), le MoMA à New York (2002), la Queensland Art Gallery à Brisbane (2017), le Met Breuer à New York (2020) et le National Museum of Modern Art de Tokyo (2022). En avril 2023, la Neue Nationalgalerie de Berlin inaugurait une installation semi-permanente intitulée Gerhard Richter: 100 Works for Berlin, rassemblant des prêts à très long terme consentis par la Fondation Gerhard Richter en 2021, parmi lesquels le cycle d’oeuvres Birkenau (2014), série de peintures abstraites de grandes dimensions.

Gerhard Richter est le lauréat de nombreux prix et distinctions prestigieux comme, parmi d’autres, le Kunstpreis Junger Westen de la Kunsthalle de Recklinghausen en Allemagne de l’Ouest (1967), le prix Arnold Bode de Cassel en Allemagne de l’Ouest (1982), le prix Oskar Kokoschka de Vienne (1985), le Goslarer Kaiserring de Goslar en Allemagne de l’Ouest (1988), le Lion d’or de la 47e Biennale de Venise (1997), le Praemium Imperiale de la Japan Art Association de Tokyo (1997), le prix Wexner du Wexner Center for the Arts de Columbus en Ohio (1998), le Foreign Honorary Membership de l’American Academy of Arts and Letters de New York (1998), le Staatspreis du Lander de Rhénanie-du-Nord-Westphalie de Düsseldorf (2000) et le Kunst- und Kulturpreis der deutschen Katholiken de la Deutsche Bischofskonferenz de Bonn (2004). En 2007, année où il crée un vitrail spectaculaire pour la cathédrale de Cologne, Gerhard Richter est élevé au rang de citoyen d’honneur de la ville.

David Zwirner représente Gerhard Richter depuis 2023. Cette année-là, sa galerie new-yorkaise accueille une exposition personnelle de l’artiste allemand. Rassemblant des peintures abstraites récentes, elle s’accompagne d’un catalogue richement illustré comportant un essai inédit de Dieter Schwarz. Au début 2024, une exposition monographique est consacrée à l’artiste chez David Zwirner London. Parmi les précédentes expositions de son travail s’étant tenues à New York, notons Gerhard Richter: Prints and Multiples 1966–1993 (1994), Gerhard Richter: Early Paintings (2000) et Gerhard Richter: Landscapes (2004). Les oeuvres de l’artiste sont présentes dans des collections publiques et privées de tout premier plan à travers le monde. Gerhard Richter vit et travaille à Cologne.

DAVID ZWIRNER, PARIS

108, rue Vieille du Temple, 75003 Paris

www.davidzwirner.com

Josh Smith @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - "Destiny" Exhibition of new paintings

Josh Smith: Destiny

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

September 13 – November 1, 2025

Josh Smith

Find Me, 2025

© Josh Smith. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Destiny, an exhibition of new paintings by JOSH SMITH, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This is Josh Smith’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

For Destiny, Josh Smith has made a series of paintings that continue his long-running dialogue with the grim reaper, a figure that has appeared in his work for years in countless guises. In these new canvases, the reaper is set loose in New York City, riding a bicycle through familiar streets, cutting past landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The once faceless symbol of death now has eyes and stares back at you, tangled in the swirl of the city. It is funny, unsettling, and alive.

Smith’s paintings are built out of seemingly contradictory parts: loose but controlled, casual but deliberate, improvised yet tightly bound. He uses the bikes almost like scaffolding. Wheels, frames, and spokes break up the surface and give him an excuse to push color and shape across the support. The reapers wear cloaks made from bold strokes of black, but also from sharp hits of high-tone green, violet, or electric orange. Each canvas is a balancing act where lines threaten to collapse but never do.

There is a real sense of watching a painter solve problems in real time. Josh Smith allows the work to remain in a state of flux. Marks overlap, collide, and seem to rearrange themselves. It is this willingness to keep things open and unsettled that gives the paintings their energy. Even as they embrace a sense of improvisation, the paintings are held together by a deep understanding of how images work and how paint moves.

In these works, the grim reaper is not just a joke or a dark emblem. He becomes a vehicle for Josh Smith to explore the formal and conceptual terrain that drives him as a painter: tension and release, composition and collapse, figure and ground. The humor of portraying death speeding through Manhattan traffic does not diminish the force of the paintings. It sharpens it. The works are graphic and immediate, but also dense, layered, and full of small surprises—lines veer off and double back; colors press against each other in unexpected ways; forms fracture and then reassemble.

Made with this show in mind, the paintings in Destiny are clear about their own pleasures: color, form, and a bit of absurdity, pushed right up to the surface without fear.

The result is a series that feels both pointed and off-the-cuff, tough but playful. These are paintings that believe in themselves even as they undercut their own seriousness. They channel the spirit of the New York School—not as a style but as a way of working that values conviction, quick thinking, and the thrill of watching it all come together on the canvas.

Artist Josh Smith

Josh Smith was born in 1976 in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up primarily in East Tennessee. His work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions at museums and arts institutions in the United States and abroad. In 2024, a solo presentation of Smith’s work, Life Drawing, was shown at The Drawing Center, New York. Other recent solo shows include those held at the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2016); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome (2015); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2011); Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2009); De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands (2009–2010); Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2008); and SculptureCenter, New York (2004).

Josh Smith’s work has also been included in important group exhibitions, such as Forever Young – 10 Years Museum Brandhorst, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019–2020); Trouble in Paradise: Collection Rattan Chadha, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2019); Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2017–2018); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015–2016), and Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2016); The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014–2015); The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009).

The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017, and his first exhibition, Emo Jungle, took place at the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street locations in New York in 2019. David Zwirner Online presented High As Fuck, the artist’s second solo show with David Zwirner in 2020. Also in 2020, a solo exhibition of new paintings was presented concurrently at the gallery’s locations in London and 69th Street in New York. In 2023, a solo presentation of the artist's work was on view at David Zwirner, Paris.

Josh Smith’s work is held in numerous international public collections including The Broad, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004 

www.davidzwirner.com

Joe Bradley @ David Zwirner, London - "Animal Family" Exhibition

Joe Bradley: Animal Family

David Zwirner, London

6 June – 1 August, 2025 

JOE BRADLEY

Parade, 2025

© Joe Bradley. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Animal Family, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Joe Bradley at the gallery’s London location. This is Joe Bradley’s second exhibition with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in May 2023. His celebrated debut at David Zwirner New York, Vom Abend, was presented in spring 2024. In November 2025, a major survey of Bradley’s works from the past ten years will open at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.

In these new paintings, figurative elements—which Joe Bradley had begun to develop in previous works—emerge as central compositional structures. ‘I have never really felt comfortable calling myself an abstract painter,’ says Joe Bradley. ‘There have always been flashes of figuration in my work. For whatever reason, at this moment, I feel ready to let it all come to the surface.’ [1] A group of horizontal paintings feature black contour lines that serve as scaffoldings for swaths of colour, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches, which coalesce into hulking, animal-like forms that fill the surface of the support. Joe Bradley builds up these forms until they achieve a loose balance between assembled wholes and disparate parts, establishing a dynamic tension in the work between cohesion and dissolution. In one painting, pinkish triangles read like teeth extending along a pronounced blue-and-white snout. Lines, shapes, and blots of colour momentarily read like a tail or paw but just as quickly come to stand as distinct visual components. This figural mass rests against a black ground dotted with white, suggesting a dark, star-filled sky.

While related to those paintings, several vertical canvases represent a notable evolution in Bradley’s work in which the human form becomes a broad organising principle. Shades of mid-century deconstructed figuration and other art-historical references and associations come through in these large, frontally oriented figures. Like his constant working and reworking of the formal and compositional elements in his paintings, such associations are part of Bradley’s open and deliberative method of painterly accumulation and adaptation, whereby he constantly reacts and responds to the process of creation itself.

In some of these paintings, the figure is quite discernible. In others, the formal elements share only a general relationship to the human form with eyelike ovals or leglike protrusions suggesting bodily architectures. Like the animal associations in the horizontal canvases, these roughly human-scale paintings reinforce such bodily associations, reflecting Bradley’s sensitivity to the formal, compositional, and material qualities of his medium.

JOE BRADLEY (b. 1975) is widely recognised for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting as well as sculpture and drawing. Over the past twenty years, Joe Bradley has constantly reinvented his approach to his art, creating a distinctive body of work that has ranged from modular, minimalist-style paintings and sculptures to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces featuring pictographic and abstract elements to refined and layered compositions that, as critic Roberta Smith notes, “balance gracefully between representation and abstraction.” Joe Bradley was born in Kittery, Maine, and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He presently lives and works in New York. Joe Bradley inaugural solo exhibition took place at Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston, in 2002. In 2006, Bradley’s first institutional solo exhibition opened at MoMA PS1, New York. The artist’s work has since been the subject of several international exhibitions. Notably, a mid-career survey of Bradley’s work was organised in 2017 by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in Buffalo, New York, which later travelled to the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. In the same year, the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso organised a presentation of Bradley’s sculptures at Pablo Picasso’s former home and studio at the Château de Boisgeloup, Gisors, France. A solo exhibition of Bradley’s work was presented at Le Consortium, Dijon, France, in 2014. Significant group exhibitions including the artist’s work have been presented at the de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2019 and 2020); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2017 and 2018); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2015); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); MoMA PS1, New York (2013); and Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy (2013), among others. In 2008, Bradley was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial. Work by the artist is held in distinguished public collections such as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; George Economou Collection, Athens; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont; Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

[1] Quoted in Jayne O’Dwyer, “Here’s How Artist Joe Bradley Ended up Plucking His Show Title from a Foreign Children’s Book, Despite Not Speaking a Word of German,” Cultured, 7 May 2024, accessed online.

DAVID ZWIRNER, LONDON

24 Grafton Street, London

www.davidzwirner.com

Michael Armitage @ David Zwirner, NYC - "Crucible" Exhibition

Michael Armitage

Crucible

David Zwirner, New York

May 8 – June 27, 2025

MICHAEL ARMITAGE 

Don’t Worry There Will Be More, 2024. 

© Michael Armitage 

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new work by Kenyan-British artist MICHAEL ARMITAGE, which inaugurates the gallery’s new Chelsea building at 533 West 19th Street. This is Armitage’s first solo show with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in 2022 and his first solo presentation in New York since Projects 110: Michael Ermitatge, organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and held at The Museum of Modern Art in 2019. The exhibition includes new paintings and bronze reliefs by the artist.

In Crucible, Michael Armitage reflects on the theme of migration. Painted on Lubugo bark cloth—a traditional Ugandan textile used in funerary rituals, which the artist has used as a support for more than a decade—these works are marked by a visceral directness that implicates the viewer in the migrant’s journey and the representation of migrants in wider society. The works in the exhibition incorporate elements of real-life imagery to present narratives that are imbued with a profound sense of humanity and pathos.

While some of the paintings evoke vignettes from a migration route that traverses the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe, other works consider aspects of migration in a broader sense.

Michael Armitage was born in Nairobi in 1984. He received his BFA from Slade School of Art, London, in 2007, and a postgraduate diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 2010. The artist was the recipient of the Ruth Baumgarte Art Award in 2020, and in 2021, he was elected a Royal Academician of Painting by the Royal Academy of Art, London.

The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. In 2023, Michael Armitage: Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle, a solo presentation of the artist’s work, was on view at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. Michael Armitage: You, Who Are Still Alive, was on view at Kunsthalle Basel in 2022. In the same year, a solo presentation of the artist’s work curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist was on view at Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. In 2021, Michael Armitage: Account of an Illiterate Man was presented by Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. The solo exhibition Michael Armitage: Paradise Edict debuted in 2020 at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and traveled to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2021. 

Other monographic exhibitions have taken place at prominent venues internationally, such as the Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2019); South London Gallery (2017); Turner Contemporary, Margate, England (2017); and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California (2016). 

Work by Michael Armitage has also been featured in significant group exhibitions. In 2024, Armitage was included in The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure, a traveling group presentation, which originated at the National Portrait Gallery, London, then traveled to The Box, Plymouth, England, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, through 2025. Works by the artist were included in Drawing in the Continuous Present, a 2022 group exhibition at The Drawing Center, New York. Armitage’s work was included in the 2021 group exhibition British Art Show 9, organized by Hayward Gallery Touring, London, which traveled to numerous venues in the United Kingdom through 2022. In 2019, the artist participated in the 58th Venice Biennale.

In 2020, Michael Armitage founded the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI) to promote art by practitioners in East Africa. The groundbreaking nonprofit arts venue hosts exhibitions, curatorial research residencies, libraries, and archives, as well as other educational initiatives that enrich the discourse on contemporary creative practices in the region. In the future, NCAI has plans to develop a postgraduate fi ne arts program, among other wide-reaching resources. 

NCAI also collaborates with writers and artists from East Africa to publish original commissioned essays, interviews, articles, and reports. NCAI’s robust publications and artists books offer insight, research, and thought leadership that underscores its commitment to documentation of the artists’ creativity. David Zwirner Books proudly supports and distributes the NCAI titles Mwili, Akili Na Roho/Body, Mind, and Spirit and I Hope So: Sane Wadu internationally. 

Michael Armitage’s works are represented in distinguished institutional collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Institute of Chicago; Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacifi c Film Archive, California; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Beyeler, Basel/Riehen, Switzerland; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Government Art Collection, London; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Kunstmuseum Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Gallery of Australia, Parkes; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Portrait Gallery, London; Norval Foundation Collection, Cape Town; Pinault Collection, Paris; The Roberts Institute of Art, London; Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Victor Pinchuk Contemporary Art Foundation, Kyiv; and Yuz Foundation Collection, Shanghai. 

Michael Armitage has been represented by David Zwirner since 2022. He lives and works in Indonesia and Nairobi.

DAVID ZWIRNER

533 West 19th Street, New York City

www.davidzwirner.com

Tomma Abts @ David Zwirner, New York

Tomma Abts 

David Zwirner, New York

May 1 – June 14, 2025

TOMMA ABTS

Lehno, 2025 

© Tomma Abts 

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner 

David Zwirner presents an exhibition by TOMMA ABTS at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street location in New York, featuring a group of new paintings that showcases the artist’s sustained engagement with process and form. These works, which extend the ongoing body of intimately scaled canvases that Tomma Abts has been making since 1998, are among her most experimental to date, playfully exploring new possibilities in their medium, format, and composition. This is Abts’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery and her first exhibition in New York since 2019.

Tomma Abts is known for her complex paintings and drawings that evolve in accordance with a self-determined and ever-widening set of parameters, which results in compositions that are intuitively constructed and precisely articulated. The textured surface, fi ne ridges, and subtle gradations of color are evidence of the process of finding, rendering, and establishing a fi nal image. As art historian and philosopher Juliane Rebentisch speculates, the subject of Abts’s works may originate in the process of their creation: “The feeling of freedom at the beginning [of Abts’s process] is imbued with a kind of euphoric sense of possibility. To the painter, the format contains infi nite possibilities of formal creation.” [1] 

In the works on view—which include a painting in two parts and a painting on silk, as well as two works that incorporate a segment of a bronze or aluminum cast—Tomma Abts finds alternate means of beginning, realizing, and resolving a painting. In some of the paintings, the artist employs the structure of a previously established composition, using it as a starting point to further explore its properties, shifting focus to different aspects of scale, color, surface, and support. Likewise, three of the exhibited works are larger paintings that each measure 34 by 25 inches—the first instance of Tomma Abts working on a different scale within this body of work. The artist deepens her investigation by locating new facets of material and depth that underscore the sense of discovery inherent to her process.

[1] Juliane Rebentisch, “Concentration, Ornament, and Singularity: Tomma Abts’s Postmodern Modernity,” in James Rondeau, ed., Tomma Abts. Exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago; London: Serpentine Galleries, 2018), p. 29.

TOMMA ABTS was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1967. She studied at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, from 1988 to 1995. Abts’s work has been the subject of major international exhibitions, most recently in 2018 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Other prominent institutions that have presented solo shows of the artist’s work include the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2014); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2011); New Museum, New York (2008; traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles); Kunsthalle Basel (2005); and The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2005). Abts’s work has also been included in major international exhibitions such as the Berlin Biennale (2006); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004); and Istanbul Biennial (2001), among others.

In 2006, Tomma Abts was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded by Tate, United Kingdom. The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2005 and received her debut exhibition at the gallery in New York in 2008.

The artist’s work is represented in public collections internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Tate, United Kingdom; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Since 1995, Tomma Abts has lived and worked in London.

DAVID ZWIRNER

525 West 19th Street, New York City

www.davidzwirner.com

Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York @ David Zwirner, New York - John Currin, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, Lisa Yuskavage

Circa 1995: 

New Figuration in New York 

David Zwirner, New York

May 7 – July 17, 2025 

MARLENE DUMAS

The Conspiracy, 1994 

Private Collection.

© Marlene Dumas. Courtesy David Zwirner 

David Zwirner presents Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. The exhibition features eight generation-defining artists who played a central role in the resurgence and expansion of figurative painting during the 1990s: John Currin, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, and Lisa Yuskavage.

By the early 1990s, as photography, film, video, and installation art were taking center stage, painting (and figurative painting in particular) was prematurely dismissed by some as having exhausted its possibilities and contemporary relevance. The artists in this exhibition challenged this notion. Looking to some of the medium’s classic tropes, genres, and techniques while also introducing new subjects, themes, and ideas, these artists redefined what painting could be: their incisive approaches to figuration not only spoke to the moment but also laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of painters. These influential artists have moreover continued to remain uniquely relevant in their ongoing work.

While working in different locations and contexts in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, each of these artists showed in New York for the first time in the early to mid-1990s, around the time David Zwirner opened in SoHo in 1993. The works on view here are drawn from key solo shows, including several that were presented at the artists’ respective New York galleries (such as Andrea Rosen Gallery, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Jack Tilton Gallery, and Marianne Boesky Gallery), and point to career-expanding presentations, such as Documenta 9 (1992); Projects 60: John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans (1997), at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the traveling exhibition Sensation (1997–2000), among other important shows from the decade that brought these artists and their radically original work to the forefront. 

Known for his academically rendered canvases and provocative subject matter, American artist JOHN CURRIN (b. 1962) draws on art-historical tropes and genres such as portraiture, still life, history painting, and mythology, giving them a distinctly contemporary appearance. As art historian Norman Bryson remarks, Currin’s figurative works, which are inspired by traditional portraits as well as pinups, pornography, B movies, and women’s magazines, “swerve between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and guilt, joy and shame.” [1] Included in this exhibition are works that debuted in Currin’s critically lauded 1994 and 1997 solo exhibitions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, such as The Cripple and The Bra Shop (both 1997) as well as Ann-Charlotte (1996), which was in the Projects 60 show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997. That presentation, curated by Laura Hoptman, included John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Luc Tuymans and signified the resurgence of figurative painting in contemporary art that had been occurring throughout the 1990s.

[1] Norman Bryson, “Maudit: John Currin and Morphology,” in Rose Dergan and Kara Vander Weg, eds., John Currin (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2006), p. 30.

PETER DOIG’s (b. 1959) atmospheric compositions focus predominantly on the figure and landscape. Influenced by his childhood in Trinidad and Canada, his paintings, drawings, and watercolors capture what appear to be familiar moments of tranquility, where abstract and uncanny elements found on the periphery of the urban and natural worlds appear with the dreamlike quality of memory. Referencing a range of art-historical precedents, Doig sources imagery from an archive of materials that includes films, newspapers, album artwork, postcards, and personal photographs. Circa 1995 includes Jetty (1994), which debuted in Doig’s first solo show in New York, at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in 1994, the year Brown opened his eponymous gallery west of SoHo, and which was painted the same year the artist was nominated for the Turner Prize, as well as his Briey (Concrete Cabin) (1994–1996), a canvas from the significant series based on Le Corbusier’s iconic modernist Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Briey-en-Forêt, France.

MARLENE DUMAS (b. 1953) has continuously probed the complexities of identity and representation in her work. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she has since lived and worked. Her paintings and drawings, frequently devoted to depictions of the human form, typically reference a vast archive of source imagery collected by the artist, including art-historical materials, mass media images, and personal snapshots of friends and family. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Dumas’s works reframe and recontextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. Having exhibited widely in Europe since the late 1970s, Marlene Dumas came to broad international attention by the early 1990s with her participation in significant group show such as Documenta 9 (1992), and solo museum presentations, including ones at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia) (1992–1994). On view in Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York is a painting by the artist that appeared in her 1994 solo show Not From Here at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, as well as two other significant paintings from the period.

British artist CHIS OFILI’s (b. 1968) atmospheric, enigmatic paintings investigate the intersection of desire, identity, and representation. Portraying characters from a range of aesthetic and cultural sources through a kaleidoscopic visual mode that bridges abstraction and figuration, his works serve as sites for journeys of creative transformation. On view in Circa 1995 are three of Ofili’s iconic dung paintings, which garnered him both critical acclaim and notoriety during the 1990s. These multilayered paintings, playfully bedecked with resin, glitter, and collage, rest on balls of elephant dung. Among those in the show are Afrodizzia (1996), which presents dazzling, psychedelic patterns of collage and color with balls of dung on its layered surface. Interspersed throughout the composition are magazine cutouts of iconic Black cultural figures. The work was included in the touring exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection—a show that made international headlines in 1999 when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, where The Holy Virgin Mary (1996; collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York), another elephant dung painting by Chis Ofili (not in the present exhibition), was displayed.

Los Angeles–based artist LAURA OWENS’s (b. 1970) experimental approach to painting challenges its material and conceptual limits. Her multilayered works combine diverse interests in folk art, comics, and wallpaper patterns with a broad range of text sources, such as the alphabet and printed media like the Los Angeles Times. Laura Owens incorporates these references into a variety of techniques and media—from traditional oil painting to silkscreening and needlework. Her inventive compositions achieve a formal unity while resisting straightforward analysis, renewing the medium of painting by questioning and exploring its master narratives. Owens’s work often takes the exhibition space into account, indicating the artist’s awareness of the relationship between the object and the viewer. Exhibited in this exhibition are works from Owens’s breakout solo shows from the late 1990s. As critic Roberta Smith noted, reviewing Laura Owens’s 1998 solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, “What is beautiful is also funny. The message here is that the medium of painting, which remains above all a surface to be engagingly animated, contains quite a bit of uncharted territory and that the old dog of formalism, unfettered by pure abstraction, can learn all sorts of new tricks.” [2]

[2] Roberta Smith, “Art in Review: Laura Owens,” New York Times, November 6, 1998.

ELIZABETH PEYTON (b. 1965) creates paintings and works on paper that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of her chosen subjects. Throughout her career, whether depicting individuals from historical or contemporary eras, Elizabeth Peyton has been driven by an openness and curiosity that seeks to approach and understand her subjects, and, often, their creative practices. As curator Donatien Grau observes: “Her desire is one for perfection: she makes her paintings into perfect images of life, which are so beautiful and draw you in. But within that desire you can feel the longing: the longing for a life that is gone, or that is going to be gone. You can feel the desire to know—truly know—those individuals.” [3] The exhibition includes paintings that depict the musicians Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher, both important recurring subjects in Peyton’s work during the 1990s, as well as the gallerist Martin McGeown, who staged an exhibition of her work in London in 1995 at his experimental gallery Cabinet.

[3] Donatien Grau, “Fragments on Elizabeth Peyton,” in CLOSE-UP: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton. Exh. cat. (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2021), p. 224.

Belgian artist LUC TUYSMANS’s (b. 1958) deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. Often rendered in a muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular-media sources. Their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity that engages equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter. In Circa 1995 are key paintings by Luc Tuymans, including works which debuted in the artist’s 1996 show The Heritage at David Zwirner. Stemming from the artist’s interest in picturing the prevailing mood of uncertainty and loss that he perceived in the United States following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the exhibition presented works that incorporated a range of recognizable symbols of American life and received critical acclaim, including from Peter Schjeldahl, who noted in his Village Voice review: “When I’m looking at Tuymans’s work, it seems to me absurd that our culture doesn’t embrace painting normally and avidly, as an enthusiastic matter of course.” [4] 

[4] Peter Schjeldahl, “Bad Thoughts: Luc Tuymans,” Village Voice, October 8, 1996, p. 86.

In her work, American artist LISA YUSKAVAGE (b. 1962) affirms the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. Her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements in which color and light are the primary vehicles of meaning. Several of Yuskavage’s standout paintings from the 1990s are presented in the exhibition, including works from her Bad Babies series (1991–1992), which the artist has described as “portraits of beings in color” and feature individual female figures seen from the knees up set against jewel-tone monochromatic fields of color. The Bad Babies, a breakthrough series of four works, was first shown together in Yuskavage’s second solo exhibition in New York, at Elizabeth Koury in 1993. Likewise, Big Little Laura (1998), another seminal painting from this decade, was first shown in New York in 1998 at Marianne Boesky Gallery. As Peter Schjeldahl wrote, again in The Village Voice, in praise of the works in that exhibition, “Remember when contemporary art was an adventure? With the likes of Yuskavage around, it is adventurous again.” [5]

[5] Peter Schjeldahl, “Purple Nipple,” Village Voice, September 29, 1998, p. 138.

DAVID ZWIRNER 

537 West 20th Street, New York City 

www.davidzwirner.com