Exhibition: John McCracken

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.”

Dates: February 28 - March 30, 2024.