At the London gallery, visitors will have the opportunity to experience “A Balancing Act Between Collapse and Spirit,” Oscar Murillo’s eighth solo exhibition at David Zwirner and his third at the London venue. This new body of work follows Murillo’s installation, “The Flooded Garden,” showcased in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern during the summer.
At Frieze London, located at Booth D13, David Zwirner will present new paintings by Rose Wylie in celebration of the artist’s ninetieth birthday. Additionally, new and historic works by Steven Shearer will be prominently featured, including paintings and works on paper, in a specially dedicated section of the booth. The gallery will also exhibit pieces by notable artists such as Francis Alÿs, Katherine Bernhardt, Joe Bradley, Noah Davis, Marcel Dzama, Sasha Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Chris Ofili, Walter Price, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jordan Wolfson, and Lisa Yuskavage.
David Zwirner will showcase four new paintings by Rose Wylie, including a diptych titled “Lilith and Gucci Boy” (2024). According to mythology, Lilith was created from the same clay as Adam and was expelled from the Garden of Eden for defying her husband, subsequently demonized. Wylie’s diptych honors Lilith’s defiance by inscribing “the first feminist” across the panels. The portrayal of Lilith here is inspired by a drawing Wylie made of the Queen of the Night relief, an ancient Babylonian terra-cotta plaque housed in the British Museum’s collection.
Steven Shearer will receive focused attention in a specially designed room by the artist. This presentation will feature nineteen works on paper and two paintings, highlighting the diversity of Shearer’s extensive archive of thousands of images and clippings. Themes such as sleep, which recur throughout his oeuvre, will be explored. The faces, figures, and objects in Shearer’s compositions are composites of those he has encountered, with his drawing practice serving as a laboratory for experimenting with various styles and mediums.
The gallery will also debut a new painting by Sasha Gordon, a recent addition to the gallery who is co-represented with Matthew Brown. The painting, titled “Cyclops” (2024), is part of an ongoing series that narrates the origin stories of the alternative universes depicted in Gordon’s work. The composition shows Gordon’s avatar crouching naked, wearing only nude slingback heels, in a wood-paneled interior. Deviating from her usual expressive self-portraits, this work features her face obscured by dark hair, with only one eye visible, staring out at the viewer. Gordon is set to have a solo exhibition at the gallery’s 19th Street location in New York in September 2025.
One of the final paintings by American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015), titled “Untitled” (2015), will also be on view. The painting is based on a found photograph, a common source for Davis’s work. It depicts a man reclining on a bed, his face blurred as if fading from memory. Barbican Art Gallery is set to open the largest institutional survey of Davis’s work to date in February 2025, featuring over fifty works that span his career. This major touring exhibition will provide a comprehensive overview of Davis’s extraordinary practice in painting, curating, and community-building as the cofounder of The Underground Museum. The exhibition is currently on view at DAS MINSK, Potsdam, and will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles later in 2025.
A postcard-sized painting by Francis Alÿs titled “Kharkiv, Ukraine” (2023) will also be featured. Since 2011, Alÿs has been examining the role of the artist in war, whether embedded with soldiers or among civilians in cities or temporary camps. This painting, created in Kharkiv, Ukraine, depicts a partially destroyed building with a lone bicyclist in the foreground, rendered in muted grey tones that underscore the daily reality of life in a war-torn region. Alÿs was recently the subject of a major solo exhibition titled “Ricochets” at Barbican Art Gallery, his largest institutional show in the UK in nearly fifteen years. The exhibition presented Alÿs’s critically acclaimed series “Children’s Games” (1999–) alongside a significant new body of work.
The gallery will also present four new paintings by Walter Price, who joined David Zwirner in May this year. Among the works on view will be “Yo clown ass think you can walk on water too huh?” (2024), the central piece in a series featuring clown motifs and a varied blue palette. The azures, aquamarines, cobalts, turquoises, and ceruleans evoke a range of emotions from sadness to the whimsical, and connect to art-historical blue periods or the endless expanses of water and sky. David Zwirner will debut Price’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, titled “Pearl Lines,” opening on November 16, 2024.
A new painting by Chris Ofili, “Waterfall—showers” (2022–2024), will also be exhibited. In this work, the satyr—a usually marginal figure in Greek mythology—takes center stage, embracing a female companion in front of a waterfall. The couple is cloaked from view by a radiant lattice of colorful orbs that flood the composition, resembling divine rainfall. Ofili’s commission for Tate Britain, “Requiem,” a mural on the museum’s North Staircase, was unveiled in 2023 and will remain on extended view for ten years. Spanning three walls, this major site-specific work pays tribute to fellow artist Khadija Saye and commemorates the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy.
Barbara Kruger will also have a new work on display. “Untitled (How dare you not be me)” (2024) relates to a large-scale vinyl wall installation that debuted at the 2024 exhibition “David Zwirner: 30 Years,” celebrating the opening of the gallery’s Los Angeles location. The phrase “How dare you not be me” also appeared as an inscription on a metal floor plaque at Kruger’s notable 1994 exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Serpentine South opened “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” in February 2024, marking Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London in over twenty years.
