Solo exhibitions by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Stan Douglas will inaugurate two spaces

We are excited to open our first two gallery spaces in Los Angeles in Melrose Hill in May 2023. On May 23, 2023, the gallery’s two spaces located at 612 and 616 North Western Avenue will open with solo exhibitions by Njideka Akunyili Crosby—her first with the gallery since joining in 2018—and Stan Douglas, one of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner.

Built in the 1930s, these two existing one-story adjacent buildings were renovated by Selldorf Architects and feature new skylights that fill the galleries with natural light, as well as a dedicated bookshop spotlighting publications by David Zwirner Books. 

In late 2023, David Zwirner’s flagship building in Los Angeles, a newly constructed three-story space designed by Selldorf Architects and located at 606 North Western Avenue, will open to the public (rendering shown above). This new building will have over 15,000 square feet of exhibition space, an outdoor terrace with views of the Hollywood Sign to the north, and a concrete staircase linking the first and second floors reminiscent of the stairs at David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery in New York. The three adjacent gallery spaces on Western Avenue will all be unified with white facades.

Opening at 616 North Western Avenue on May 23, Los Angeles–based Akunyili Crosby’s solo exhibition will present new and recent works that reflect the artist’s hybrid cultural background and experiences, portraying multiple places and temporalities together within single compositions. In her methodically layered compositions, the Nigerian-born artist combines painted depictions of people, places, and subjects from her life with photographic transfers derived from her personal image archive as well as Nigerian magazines, and other mass media sources. The resulting works are visual tapestries of contemporary life that evocatively express the intricacies of African diasporic identity. This exhibition will travel to our New York gallery in September 2023. (Learn more here.)

Stan Douglas’s major two-channel video installation ISDN (2022), along with a group of related photographs, will open at 612 North Western Avenue. Created for his solo presentation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where he represented Canada, this body of work collectively considers the reverberations of the events of 2011—a year that saw pervasive global unrest, including Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and uprisings in numerous other cities, including London and Douglas’s native Vancouver. This will be Douglas's first solo presentation in more than twenty years in Los Angeles, where he lives (in addition to Vancouver) and serves as the chair of the graduate art program at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. (Learn more about the show here.)

David Zwirner’s Los Angeles spaces will be co-led by Robert Goff and Alexandra Tuttle. Goff, a senior director at the gallery, was based out of David Zwirner’s New York locations from 2015 to 2019 and relocated to Los Angeles in early 2020. Tuttle, also a senior director, joined the gallery in February 2022. Together they will oversee the gallery’s presence in Los Angeles.

“The gallery has a long history with Los Angeles. Artists like Diana Thater, Toba Khedoori, and the late Jason Rhoades, who have been with the gallery since its beginning, have lived and worked in Los Angeles for years,” states David Zwirner. “It is a city that I love for its vibrancy and creative spirit, and I am so excited for our new spaces there. I know that I share this excitement with our artists and estates, who are looking forward to presenting their work in Los Angeles.”