David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by American artist John McCracken at the gallery’s 616 North Western Avenue location in Los Angeles, presented on the ninetieth anniversary of his birth. Featuring a selection of the artist’s signature planks and columns installed in the round, this will be the first solo presentation in more than twenty years in a city he long called home and with which he was intimately associated. In bringing together two of his most enduring sculptural forms, the exhibition will illuminate the artist’s nuanced modulation of color, shape, and surface that extended throughout his more than five-decade-long career. McCracken developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to create objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, resulting in the highly reflective, smooth surfaces for which he would become known. As he described his practice, “In distilling my ideas I was doing something analogous to making poetry—trying, in a way, to say the most with the least.”1 1 John McCracken and Matthew Higgs, “Interview,” in Early Sculpture/John McCracken. Exh. cat. (New York: Zwirner & Wirth, 2005), p. 8. - David Zwirner is pleased to announce a group exhibition of works by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Palermo, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, and Richard Serra on view at the gallery’s 612 North Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Featuring key artists from the gallery’s program who were at the avant-garde of the New York art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, this presentation will bring together a selection of abstract and non-representational works that radically reconfigured the possibilities of their mediums in distinct ways. Highly influential to each other as well as their peers in New York and around the world, these artists established minimal, post-minimal, abstract, and conceptual vocabularies whose echoes still permeate the art world today. Complementing this presentation will be an exhibition of works by John McCracken, on view concurrently in the gallery’s 616 North Western Avenue space. McCracken’s geometric sculptural forms exemplify the distinctly West Coast take on the art coming out of New York during this period. Meticulously crafted from plywood coated with fiberglass and layers of pigmented polyester resin and taken by hand to a high polish, these works embody McCracken’s long-standing investigation of surface, form, color, and the transcendent potential of minimalist abstraction.