David Zwirner

52 Walker is pleased to present its second exhibition, END OF SUBJECT, featuring the work of Los Angeles–based artist Nikita Gale (b. 1983). Engaged with the history and politics of sound and its surrounds, Gale will present an aurally and visually rich environment in the gallery, complete with light, movement, and sound, which calls upon the tacit agreement between the audience and the materials that enable the act of viewing and experiencing. Through the artist’s multidisciplinary approach, Gale recasts and destabilizes notions of witnessing, visibility, and representation that operate both inside and outside of the space as well as within and among our bodies.

Curated by Hilton Als

David Zwirner is pleased to present Unrepeated: Unique Prints from Two Palms, an exhibition of recent unique prints made at the visionary print studio Two Palms, at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. This selection will include works by Marina Adams, Mel Bochner, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Carroll Dunham, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Dana Schutz, Stanley Whitney, and Terry Winters. Two Palms has been at the vanguard of experimental printmaking processes since it was established in 1994 by David Lasry in downtown New York. With an array of specialized tools and equipment, such as its rare hydraulic press, the studio has championed the creation of monoprints and monotypes—which Lasry sees as “perhaps the most diverse and dynamic of all the print mediums.”1 The exhibition is a fitting collaboration with Lasry, a longtime friend of the gallery, who has worked with numerous David Zwirner artists and others to conceive of new and surprising ways to realize their goals. The prints on view will illuminate a range of these processes, which have resulted in some of the most inventive applications of the medium today.

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by James Castle (1899–1977). Organized in collaboration with the James Castle Collection and Archive LP, the exhibition offers an extensive look at Castle’s captivating visual world, which documents his home and surroundings in and around Boise and central Idaho through vivid drawings and assemblages. An overview of the artist’s expansive practice, this exhibition explores how Castle, who was born deaf, found his primary means of expression through drawing and other forms of art making. Using sharpened sticks and soot from his family’s wood stove, which he mixed with his own saliva, Castle created elaborate and detailed drawings. These intricate works embody a sense of lived-in familiarity and display the artist’s preternatural understanding of perspective and spatial relations and his deep sensitivity to his environment. As John Beardsley notes, “What Castle found in this … place became the subject of acute visual attention and near photographic memory: minute details of the spaces he inhabited provided him with an inventory of images that he would repeat, transform, and manipulate in his art for the whole of his life. He remembered—and drew—the contours of every room, every bed and bureau, the patterns of wallpaper, the exteriors of houses and barns and other outbuildings, adjacent roads, fences, and fields.… Castle was able to recall the exact ridgelines of a mountain visible from his childhood home and replicate it in drawing after drawing.”

52 Walker is pleased to open its inaugural exhibition, A Line, on Thursday, October 28, 2021. The presentation will feature works by Kandis Williams, whose versatile practice spans collage, performance, video, assemblage, and installation. Her work interrogates issues of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism. This will be Williams’s first solo presentation in New York. Based primarily in Los Angeles, Williams will debut new works that were created in New York for A Line. The exhibition will feature a video, collages, and sculptures that move toward a formal dance notation. Notation has been used in different modes throughout history to capture and inscribe the qualities of movement in two dimensions. Williams draws upon her background in dramaturgy to envision a space that accommodates the varied biopolitical economies that inform how movement might be read. She establishes indices that network the parts of the anatomy, regions of Black diaspora, communication and obfuscation, and how popular culture and myth are interconnected. Kandis Williams was born in 1985 in Baltimore and received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 2009. She is the founder of the publishing and educational platform Cassandra Press. Williams was recently awarded the Mohn Award for artistic excellence following her participation in the 2020 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2021); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2021 and 2016); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018); Works on Paper, Vienna (2017); St. Charles Projects, Baltimore (2016); and SADE, Los Angeles (2016). Williams is represented by Night Gallery, Los Angeles. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

Curated by Lisa Yuskavage and Jarrett Earnest

Curated by Simon Wu