David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of work from the 1940s by Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York. Organized in collaboration with the Ad Reinhardt Foundation, this will be the third solo exhibition of Reinhardt’s work at David Zwirner, following major presentations of his “ultimate” black paintings in 2013, and his blue paintings in 2017.
 

Reinhardt charted a unique and radically experimental path in his art during the 1940s. While many of his contemporaries spent much of the decade abstracting from recognizable forms, Reinhardt thrust himself into the project of completely non-objective painting. The works from this decade include pioneering geometric grids, dynamic calligraphic lines, and compositions whose reduced forms and palettes foreshadow the artist’s red, blue, and black paintings of the subsequent decades and anticipate the direction of abstract painting more generally. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois notes: “Reinhardt was perhaps the only American artist in the forties … to understand what the real issues were at the time. In this sense … he was already (even before the fifties) an artist of the sixties.”1 

  1 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Limit of Almost,” Ad Reinhardt. Exh. cat. (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 17.
 

Image: Ad Reinhardt, Untitled, c. 1940.© Anna Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2023.