David Zwirner

Profile

David Zwirner is a long-time player in the gallery scene, often cited as an inspiration to the younger set. Founded in the early ‘90s in SoHo, his gallery was one of the last tastemakers to abandon the area to the hordes of weekend shoppers and move to Chelsea in 2002. Zwirner’s stable of contemporary artists is international (often German) and very progressive. Artists run the gamut from the painfully subtle, like the stoic head portraits of German photographer Thomas Ruff, to the playful and polymorphously perverse, such as the drawings of L.A. ex-punker (and now Bucksbaum-winner) Raymond Pettibon, who culls from sources as wide-ranging as pulp fiction and Gumby. The gallery also exhibits the work of Canadian conceptual film/video artist Stan Douglas, and that of Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, who uses a carefully controlled palette to depict everything from landscapes to dark scenes from recent history. — Alex Mar