Davis’s body of work encompasses, on the one hand, his lush, sensual, figurative paintings and, on the other, an ambitious institutional project called The Underground Museum, a black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles. The works on view will highlight both parts of Davis’s oeuvre, featuring more than twenty of his most enduring paintings, as well as models of previous exhibitions curated by Davis at The Underground Museum. The exhibition also includes a “back room,” modeled on the working offices at The Underground Museum, featuring more paintings by Davis, as well as BLKNWS by Davis’s brother Kahlil Joseph; a sculpture by Karon Davis, the artist’s widow; and Shelby George furniture, designed by Davis’s mother Faith Childs-Davis. The exhibition will be on view through February 22 at David Zwirner 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner
Jasmine Thomas-Girvan & Chris Ofili: Affinities @ David Zwirner In London
Affinities is a two-person exhibition of work by Trinidad-based artists Jasmine Thomas-Girvan and Chris Ofili at the gallery’s London location. Featuring sculptural works by Thomas-Girvan alongside paintings by Ofili, Affinities brings to light the rich artistic conversation that exists between these two artists, arising both in response to their shared environment as well as an ongoing dialogue throughout the nearly two decades they have known each other.
Drawing alternately from Caribbean history, myth, ritual, literature, and her own experience, Thomas-Girvan’s poetically inflected works are grounded in the specificity of the Caribbean landscape and the region’s colonial past, but open out onto universal themes—most prominently, transformation and the construction of identity. Her sculptures and installations seamlessly weave together traditional supports, such as wood and bronze, with both found everyday objects and materials sourced from the natural environment, including shells, pieces of coral, palm fronds, and mangrove hairs, culled from a vast collection that she has amassed over time. The resulting assemblages, which cohere into singular visual statements, are at once familiar and fantastical, both venerating and working through a rich and complicated past. As Ofili notes: “Jasmine’s work tells beautiful and mysterious tales that are a combination of fragility and dread with a knowing nod towards alchemy and witchcraft of the past, present, and future.”
On view will be several large- and small-scale canvases by Ofili from a 2019 body of work devoted to the figures of Calypso and Odysseus from Homer’s Odyssey. Inspired in part by the music of Trinidad, where Ofili has lived since 2005, the artist has reimagined Calypso—traditionally represented as a deceptive femme fatale—as a striking mermaid, and he has visualised Odysseus as a beautiful, dark-skinned suitor. In the paintings, Ofili presents the characters with curving bodies, sumptuously spread out across the compositions and displayed in layered surfaces filled with arabesque vines and bubble-like forms. Known for his intricate, kaleidoscopic paintings and works on paper that deftly merge abstraction and figuration, Ofili’s recent works—vibrant, symbolic, and frequently mysterious—evoke the lush landscapes and local traditions of Trinidad. Affinities is on view through September 21 at David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street, London. Photographs courtesy of David Zwirner
Singing the Body Electric: A Group Exhibition @ David Zwirner In Hong Kong
Singing the Body Electric features work by aaajiao, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jian Yi-Hong, Wolfgang Tillmans, Wei Jia, and Lisa Yuskavage. The show’s title is derived from Walt Whitman’s ecstatic and politically nuanced poem “I Sing the Body Electric” from Leaves of Grass (1855). The exhibition includes work from across various media that likewise celebrates and complicates themes of the body and desire, while exploring physicality and identity in the context of the synthetic and alienating nature of a highly digitized world. Singing the Body Electric is on view through August 10 at David Zwirner 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Oscar Murillo: Manifestation @ David Zwirner London
A new series of paintings by the Columbian artist, Oscar Murillo, are on view for the first time at David Zwirner’s London gallery. Murillo’s manifestation paintings, in particular, represent a marked evolution in the artist’s engagement with process. These paintings explore a considered approach to mark-making, and when viewed together, highlight the artist’s inventive and engaging studio practice. The exhibition also includes a new installation building on Murillo’s sustained interest in travel and questions around labour and the geographical flow of humanity. The artist’s body of work demonstrates a nuanced understanding of globalization, and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced and increasingly intermingled. Manifestation is on view through July 26 at David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street, London. photographs courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
Joan Mitchell: "I carry my landscapes around with me" @ David Zwirner New York
Joan Mitchell’s “I carry my landscapes around with me” is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s multi-paneled paintings created across four decades. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career through her inventive interpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color. Her emotionally charged compositions evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of Mitchell’s polyptych panels is ideally suited for landscapes—a poignant subject for the artist that she linked directly to memory. The exhibition features paintings from both public and private collections, as well as works drawn from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “I carry my landscapes around with me” is on view through July 12 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner New York.
Wolfgang Tillmans @ David Zwirner In New York
How likely is it that only I am right in this matter? is an exhibition of new and recent work by Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans here eschews his signature style of floor-to-ceiling installations in favor of a more minimal, linear presentation concise in subject matter as well as scope. Featuring photographs, video and sound, and a spoken-word piece, the show revisits themes explored by the artist throughout his thirty-year career, but also initiates a subtle reevaluation of how to portray a world consistently in flux. How likely is it that only I am right in this matter? is on view through October 20 at David Zwirner 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer
Adel Abdessemed Le Vase Abominable
David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new works by Adel Abdessemed, on view at their recently opened London gallery. Le Vase Abominable is the artist’s third solo show with David Zwirner since joining the gallery in 2008. Across a wide range of media, Abdessemed transforms well-known materials and imagery into charged artistic declarations. The artist pulls freely from myriad sources—personal, historical, social, and political—to create a visual language that is simultaneously rich and economical, sensitive and controversial, radical and mundane. Le Vase Abominable will be on view from February 22, 2013 to March 30, 2013 atDavid Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street, London, UK
Stand Still Like a Hummingbird
Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha with six of his books on his head, 1970
David Zwirner gallery in New York presents Stand Still like the Hummingbird, an exhibition curated by Bellatrix Hubert in the gallery’s 525 and 533 spaces. It takes its title from a collection of short stories and essays by American writer Henry Miller, published in 1962. Known equally for his mysticism and dark humor, Miller proposed the idea of “flying backwards, standing still like a hummingbird” as a lighthearted antidote to the frantic pace of modern society. The exhibition also embraces the paradox in the appropriation of its title – the hummingbird only appears still because of the rapidity of its wings – and gathers a selection of paintings, sculptures, and videos by artists who engage with contradictions, impossibilities, and the absurd. The exhibition also explores the notion of "understated gestures and formal restraint" - finding its historical starting point in Marcel Duchamp's Comb and other readymades artworks that came to influence a century of art making. Works in the show include Forty-two postcards by On Kawara, stamped by the time he got up on a given day and simply titled I Got Up(1968-1976), a collection of Ed Ruscha’s photobooks (1964-1978), works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Francis Alÿs, Marcel Duchamp, and more. Stand Still Like a Hummingbird will be on view from June 28 to August 3, 2012 at David Zwirner gallery, 525 West 19th Street, New York.
Disco Angola
David Zwirner gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Stan Douglas, titled Disco Angola, Douglas has again assumed the fictional character of a photo-journalist, this time a regular in the burgeoning disco underground of the early 1970s New York. For Douglas’s alter-ego, the new scene offered a cathartic respite from urban grittiness in a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Evolving out of funk and soul, the disco lifestyle mobilized the gay community in particular, and its self-conscious embrace of glamour and fashion represented a departure from the previous decade’s counterculture. Disco Angola is on view at the David Zwirner gallery until April 28, 525 West 19th Street.
MICHAËL BORREMANS: The Devil’s Dress
David Zwirner gallery in New York presents an exhibition of new works by Michaël Borremans, The Devil’s Dress. Borremans’ drawings, paintings, and films present an evocative combination of solemn-looking characters, unusual close-ups, and unsettling still lifes. There is a theatrical dimension to his works, which are at once highly staged and ambiguous, just as his complex and open-ended scenes lend themselves to conflicting moods—simultaneously nostalgic, darkly comical, disturbing, and grotesque. His paintings display a concentrated dialogue with previous art historical epochs, however their unconventional compositions and curious narratives defy expectations and lend them an indefinable yet universal character. On view until December 17, 2011 - 525 West 19th Street.