All posts tagged: David Zwirner

Dealers Are Abuzz at Frieze LA’s VIP Day: ‘It’s a Frenzy’

Dealers Are Abuzz at Frieze LA’s VIP Day: ‘It’s a Frenzy’

Published by José Betancourt

First-day sales reports from galleries at the latest edition of the Frieze Los Angeles art fair indicate an abundance of enthusiasm. Enough New Yorkers escaped the snow to be everywhere in the aisles, and major California collectors and cultural figures were spotted in numbers. “It’s a frenzy,” said clearly harried LA dealer Charlie James, standing amid works by Kristopher Raos, Manuel López, and other gallery artists. “We’ve already sold three times as much as at the entire Art Basel Miami Beach in December,” said Niamh Coghlan, director at London’s Richard Saltoun Gallery, by early afternoon. “This is the perfect-sized fair,” she added, with about 100 exhibitors at the Santa Monica Airport. The gallery is exhibiting works by two Italian artists, Romany Eveleigh and Bice Lazzari.  Related Articles Big galleries were making big sales, with David Zwirner placing a 2016 work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Grandmother’s Parlour, for $2.8 million to a European foundation. The gallery had also sold a 2020 painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye for $1.5 million and two Lisa Yuskavage works for $280,000 and …

David Zwirner to Represent Louis Fratino, Painter of Queer Intimacy

David Zwirner to Represent Louis Fratino, Painter of Queer Intimacy

Published by José Betancourt

With his fame fast rising, painter Louis Fratino has joined David Zwirner, one of the world’s biggest galleries. Rather than cutting ties with his past galleries, as many artists do when they join a mega-gallery like Zwirner, Fratino will still be represented by Berlin’s Galerie Neu and New York’s Sikkema Jenkins Malloy, which helped make the artist famous in the city he calls home. Working in vivid figuration, Fratino has memorably painted bathers, fornicating lovers, dancers, nude men in repose, and himself in his studio. He also periodically branched out into other genres, including still lifes and landscapes. Related Articles Fratino had already been on the ascent when he appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale, in a part of Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition that paired his paintings with ones by Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar, who created erotically charged images of relations between men. This year, a Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition will set Fratino’s art in dialogue with work by Henri Matisse, the French modernist whose figurative paintings likewise simplified their subjects into curvaceous, clear …

What Are Galleries Bringing to Art Basel Qatar?

What Are Galleries Bringing to Art Basel Qatar?

Published by José Betancourt

When Art Basel opens its first edition in Doha on Tuesday, the difference—from other editions—will be immediately apparent. This is the smallest Basel fair by far: just 85 galleries, all of them mounting solo presentations, in a layout that feels closer to a curated exhibition than a commercial free-for-all. For comparison there were 206 galleries in Paris and 283 in Miami. While sources have told me that following editions in Qatar will grow to Paris- and Miami-size, the smaller scale for the first edition is deliberate. Unlike the sister fairs, where aisles can blur into one another and it’s not unusual to see the artist du jour in multiple booths, Art Basel Qatar has imposed tight limits. Related Articles Most galleries are using only two walls and brought only a handful of works. There are no built-in power sources, which effectively rules out video and large installations, and no chairs or tables in the booths. (The galleries, however, were each offered a custom designed bench.)  Dealers can bring works in reserve, but I’ve been told there are …

Galleries in New York and LA Join the Anti-ICE National Strike

Galleries in New York and LA Join the Anti-ICE National Strike

Published by José Betancourt

In a rare show of political solidarity for the art world, a growing number of New York galleries will close on Friday, January 30, as part of the nationwide general strike protesting expanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. These actions come amid global scrutiny over the use of deadly force against protestors and allegations that federal tactics are eroding constitutional rights, including protections for free expression and due process. Industry heavyweights, such as Pace Gallery, which will close its US locations, David Zwirner, Almine Rech, P·P·O·W Gallery, David Kordansky, and Marian Goodman—alongside smaller outfits like Ulterior, Hannah Traore, and Hesse Flatow—have aligned with businesses and cultural institutions, such as LA’s Institute of Contemporary Art, in opposition to Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, with a flashpoint emerging in Minneapolis after the fatal shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.  Related Articles Scattered reports of federal overreach—including the detention of US citizens and Native Americans, the barring of lawmakers and attorneys from ICE facilities, and fraught debates over the definition of domestic terrorism—have …

52 Walker Quietly Becomes a David Zwirner Gallery

52 Walker Quietly Becomes a David Zwirner Gallery

Published by José Betancourt

When 52 Walker opened in Tribeca in 2021, it did so with unusual fanfare. The space, founded by Ebony L. Haynes under the umbrella of David Zwirner, was widely framed as a corrective gesture within the commercial gallery system: a Kunsthalle-style venue with an all-Black staff, full curatorial autonomy, and a mandate untethered from the usual pressures of artist representation. The New York Times hailed it as a rare experiment inside a mega-gallery structure, emphasizing both its symbolic and structural ambitions. Now, four years later, that experiment has quietly entered a new phase. Related Articles The Tribeca space known as 52 Walker is officially a David Zwirner gallery space. The change has already taken place, though it has not been publicly announced as such. As of this week, the gallery’s website lists the space as closed “for installation,” with no indication that its mandate has shifted. The most recent exhibition, a critically engaged presentation by Nicole Eisenman, was the final show at 52 Walker as a standalone brick-and-mortar project. The transition follows Haynes’s promotion last fall to a newly created …

Amy Sillman Leaves Gladstone Gallery for David Zwirner

Amy Sillman Leaves Gladstone Gallery for David Zwirner

Published by José Betancourt

David Zwirner Gallery now represents New York–based artist Amy Sillman. Sillman, whose colorful paintings and drawings expertly straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. She previously worked with Gladstone Gallery. Her first show there, “Mostly Drawing” in 2018, offered viewers “a thrilling, rollercoaster-like experience,” as Phyllis Tuchman wrote in her review for ARTnews. Before that, Sillman showed with Capitain Petzel and carlier | gebauer in Berlin, Sikkema Jenkins and Casey Kaplan in New York, Campoli Presti in Paris, Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and various other galleries. Related Articles In a statement, David Zwiner praised Sillman’s practice as “endlessly intelligent” and said he admired her “remarkable ability to mine the entire history of [painting] in the process.” While Sillman has been showing her work internationally for decades, Zwirner specifically mentioned her recent show the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany. The two-part show (which debuted at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2024) featured Sillman’s paintings, drawings, prints, collages, large installations, and animations from the past decade, as well as a companion exhibition of works chosen by Sillman from …