Colin O’Con, Magma Arch (2015), via Art Observed

In 2012, David Zwirner Gallery launched a novel concept for the summer group show.  Called People Who Work Here, the gallery opened its floors to its own employees, launching an exhibition of works that underscored the depth of talent of those working for the international mega-gallery.  Four years later, the gallery has picked up where the last exhibition left off, opening a new iteration of the show that welcomes over 35 artists to show their work at the gallery’s 19th Street location, just steps away from a massive new Jeff Koons sculpture in the gallery’s open garage exhibition space.  Curated by Marina Gluckman and Jaime Schwartz in gallery’s Research and Exhibitions department, the show takes a playful look at the gallery’s skilled employee based, and offers subtle historical parallels with its own selection of artists.

Joel Fennell, Still-life (after McCobb) (2016), via Art Observed

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Jordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture (2016) All images are Courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London and David Zwirner, New York.

On view at David Zwirner’s 525 West 19th street location is Jordan Wolfson’s most recent investigation of the sculptural genre in the age of new technology.  Following 2014’s exceptionally received and widely seen (Female Figure), the voluptuous and arresting female animatronic that Wolfson created at a professional Hollywood film studio, his current exhibition introduces Colored sculpture: a larger-than-life, red-haired teenage boy suspended from a mechanic structure that controls his movements and often violently degrades his body.

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Luc Tuymans, Murky Water (2015), via Art Observed

Luc Tuymans works at the tenuous grasp of the image on reality, exploiting momentary glimmers, flashes of light, and seconds of spatial repose, all executed through his signature, muted color palette in an attempt to delve even deeper into the slight seconds that constitute his subject matter.  Here, at his new show with David Zwirner, the artist has turned towards themes of decay and isolation, lending his already staid pieces an increased degree of melancholy. (more…)

David Zwirner will represent the estate of Josef Albers, the New York Times reports.  “He’s really one of the few artists of the 20th century whose life and work span both halves of the century, connecting the idealism of the German Bauhaus in Europe with postwar America,” said David Leiber, one of the gallery’s directors. (more…)

Sherrie Levine, Pink SMEG Refrigerator and Renoir Nudes (2016), via Art Observed

Opening her first exhibition with David Zwirner in New York City, Sherrie Levine has taken over the 2nd floor of the gallery’s 20th Street Flagship, bringing a body of works that feels like a fitting first entry in her collaboration with Zwirner, while signaling new steps forward in her challenging and cerebral practice.

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Michael Riedel, Untitled (Art Material_Lycaenops 90) (2015), all photos via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Entering Michael Riedel’s current exhibition at David Zwirner, visitors encounter an intriguing  spatial arrangement, composed of abstract patterns blanketing gallery walls.  Pulled from art material supplier BLICK’s website, the text, distorted to illegibility, is abstracted from its informative ends and transformed into purely graphical patterns.  Barely comprehensible through a closer inspection, words listing different dimensions for canvases, or describing various color charts are no longer usable.  Distortion of this conversation between information and its raison d’être commonly emerges in Riedel’s practice, bringing this dialogue into a reversed cycle, in which function becomes infertile and surplus conveys aesthetic.  (more…)

Karla Black, Ways Appear (2016), via David Zwirner

In her second exhibition at David Zwirner, Scottish artist Karla Black takes over the gallery’s 525 West 19th street location to orchestrate a body of work that smoothly maneuvers through rigid conceptions of medium or genres.  In her previous exhibition in 2014, Black executed a carpet-like installation of bath bombs, nail polish, Sellotape and powder paint, infusing an otherworldly, ephemeral aura into the gallery’s white cube architecture through its lyrical presence.  Here, she presents another floor install, employing familiar everyday objects alongside artistically pertinent materials. The work, Includes Use, utilizes toilet paper collected from different parts of the globe, each manufactured in different shades and hues. Akin to budding flowers, the folds of toilet paper in their assorted hues pierce through earthy, plaster powder and paint, channeling a sort of surreal, utopian topography. (more…)

Tom Wesselmann, San Francisco Nude with Green Wall (1959) All images © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, photo c/o David Zwirner

For its current exhibition in London, David Zwirner‘s Grafton Street gallery compiled a collection of thirty collages. created between 1959 and 1964, by the late Pop artist Tom Wesselmann, works that mark a significant point in the artist’s career as a leading figure of the Pop art movement, just at the point where he was transitioning from brusque abstraction to an interest in the commodity formats and spatial confines of the canvas.  Wesselmann’s later career, which consists of bold, graphically vivid works is hinted at through these collages, exposing the growth of his iconic style, and his interest in capturing interiors, landscapes, and female nudes. (more…)

Doug Wheeler, Untitled (1969/2014), via David Zwirner © 2016 Doug Wheeler

The work of Doug Wheeler is an exercise in embodiment and space, perhaps more so than many of his Light and Space compatriots.  Rather than merely exploring the sensations of seeing and perceiving space, Wheeler pushes beyond this sense of expanded optics and its cognitive effects, often exploring how this sense of space is reflected onto broader sensations of the body.  Encasements, the third solo exhibition by Wheeler in collaboration with David Zwirner, continues this work, showing a body of smaller-scale works that work in a strikingly harmonious series of interactions throughout the gallery. (more…)

Marcel Dzama & Raymond Pettibon, Beware Diamond Dog (2016)

Forgetting the Hand, a novel collaboration between Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon, is currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery.  The show pulls together two artists, who, though emerging from vastly different generations and backgrounds, share noted parallels in the conveyance of the ridicule of contemporary culture.  Even the exhibition title emphasizes the interconnectedness between the two artists’ practices, where distinction of authorship between the two evaporates. Both represented by David Zwirner since the 90’s, Pettibon and Dzama embarked on this collaboration in the summer of 2015 on the occasion of New York Art Book Fair, where David Zwirner Books presented a zine printed with many of these pieces. (more…)

David Zwirner is reportedly looking for exhibition space in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reports.  “A couple of years ago, we thought we would just come to the art fair. Now, I’m convinced we need a gallery here,” he said. (more…)

Donald Judd, Untitled (1979), via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Over the course of his sculpting career, Cor-ten steel remained a consistent source of inspiration for Donald Judd, its variance in texture, hue and responsiveness to light offering the artist a malleable yet solid framework to continue his investigations in spatial interaction, light and time throughout his pieces.   Taking this material fascination as its starting point, David Zwirner is presenting a series of pieces from across the artist’s career, joined together by his use of Cor-ten, and underscoring the metal’s complementary characteristics when applied towards Judd’s aesthetic project. (more…)

Isa Genzken, Nefertiti Sculpture (2015), via Art Observed

David Zwirner has opened the front door on its elusively large, hangar-style exhibition space on 19th street for a show of new sculptural work by Isa Genzken, continuing the artist’s ongoing interests in the intersections of fashion and sculpture, and an engagement with the  human form in a particularly explicit manner.  The show is the artist’s third with the gallery in 10 years. (more…)

WWD profiles Lucas Zwirner, son of mega-dealer David Zwirner, and editor of the gallery’s young publishing imprint, David Zwirner books.  “I remember reading Wallace Stevens poems and feeling like I could not be doing anything more important,” he says. “At least for the first two or three years, I wanted nothing to do with the sphere of influence that generates from [the gallery].”  (more…)

Gordon Matta-Clark, Energy & Abstraction (Installation View)

Mystery, stemming from associations with the notion of void, always played a crucial role in opulent practice of Gordon Matta-Clark.  Differing from the often massively-sized voids he created in or between buildings before their demolition throughout his career, however, the pen and ink works currently on view at David Zwirner’s 20th street location appears as an almost direct response, although on a much more manageable scale.  Blank paper surfaces submit to restless marks of ink in splashes of color or stark black hues, signaling complex narratives behind the artist’s demanding projects, while deep carvings on gesso expose concealed layers that otherwise would go unnoticed when compared to his immense carvings through the architectural skeletons of buildings. (more…)

Oscar Murillo is the subject of a profile piece in the Evening Standard this week, as the artist prepares to open his exhibition at David Zwirner London, and reflects back on his years working as a cleaner to support his work.  “Art to me has never been about paying the bills — it’s ironic to say that now, but it really wasn’t,” he says. (more…)

David Zwirner has announced that it is now representing the estate of painter Sigmar Polke.  “Growing up in Cologne, I had the great fortune of meeting Sigmar and witnessing firsthand the enormous influence he exerted on his generation and the ones that followed,” Zwirner himself says.  “His creativity and curiosity knew no bounds, and his ability to innovate across different media is unparalleled.” (more…)

Wolfgang Tillmans, Iquitos Dos (2013), All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.

David Zwirner is currently presenting artist Wolfgang Tillmans’ PCR, his first exhibition with the gallery following his departure from longtime representatives Andrea Rosen Gallery. Doing the justice to the exhibition’s inaugural nature, the gallery has reserved its two locations on 19th street for the massive show of photographs, sculpture and video, which takes its name from an abbreviation of the scientific term “polymerase chain reaction.”  A technique applied in molecular biology to reach a deeper and more particular genetic identity for a person’s DNA, PCR serves as a metaphor for the works on view, which near a hundred in total.  Each piece here underscores the breadth and depth of the artist’s expansive oeuvre, and every piece, similar to a molecule, contributes to build a larger pattern, holding traces of the German-born artist’s decades long career. (more…)

Dan Flavin, untitled (to Sonja) (1969), via Art Observed

An idea that began with a single light was the generative force for New York minimalist Dan Flavin‘s ongoing interests in light and space. Starting in 1963 with the creation of diagonal of May 25th, 1963, a fluorescent lamp installed diagonally on a wall, Flavin quickly adopted light as his central aesthetic focus, and his journey through the environmental capacities of  light can now be seen in Corners, Barriers and Corridors at David Zwirner.

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De Wain Valentine, Curved Wall Clear (1969), via Art Observed

Set inside David Zwirner’s West 19th Street locations, a series of works from De Wain Valentine’s late 1960’s and 1970’s output is currently on view, culling a number of works by the Light and Space artist that illustrate his technical, material and spatial innovations during the early years of his career.

De Wain Valentine, Works from the 1960s and 1970s (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Michael Borremans, Black Mould / Pogo (2015), via Art Observed

Belgian painter Michael Borremans has long mined the aesthetic moorings of antiquity for his work, creating meticulously labored paintings that owe much to 17th and 18th century painterly technique.  Originally trained as a photographer, Borremans’s craft is tempered by a notable scholarly, contextual awareness, frequently using his mooring in the present day to offer the occasional critique or inversion of his historical inspirations.  Such is the case with the artist’s most recent body of work at David Zwirner’s 24 Grafton Street gallery in London, a series of dark, occasionally disturbing pieces that use the painter’s signature style to amplify their surrealist aspects.

Michael Borremans, Black Mould / The Badger’s Song (2015), via Art Observed

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Donald Judd, Untitled (1965), via David Zwirner

The tight, straight lines of Donald Judd run directly through the entirety of his career, from his early painted works on through to the increasingly large sculptural works and stacks of the 1980’s and 90’s.  Moving to purify notions of space, light, color and depth, Judd’s career wove a strikingly influential path through the landscape of post-war and contemporary art.  It is this tradition that David Zwirner in London seeks to explore, pulling together a small but tightly organized collection of works by Judd for a show exploring the range and depth of the artist’s career, from his early sculptural explorations with iron and plexiglass, on through to his more refined “stacks,” and wall-mounted installations. (more…)

Thomas Ruff, phg.03, (2012), via David Zwirner

David Zwirner’s 19th Street Gallery spaces in Chelsea are currently exhibiting a selection of recent works by German photographer Thomas Ruff, showcasing the artist’s ongoing inquiries into digital interjections into the photo making process, and his studies on natural phenomena filtered through the lens of digital photography.

Thomas Ruff, photograms (Installation View), via David Zwirner (more…)

Annabelle Selldorf, the architect behind David Zwirner Gallery’s newest space on 20th Street in Manhattan, was recently interviewed in Architectural Digest about the unique, cast-in-place concrete façade of the building, the challenges created by such a demanding design, and her experience working with Zwirner to conceptualize the design of the building.  “Truthfully, it was David who wanted the building to be cast-in-place concrete.”  She says. “But like any layperson, he didn’t necessarily know what that entailed. He just knew that he wanted a certain look and feel. And I, knowing more about what it takes to actually do a concrete structure, realized this posed a formidable challenge.” (more…)