NEW YORK, NY.- On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Ad Reinhardt’s birth, David Zwirner announces an exhibition of the artist’s work in collaboration with the Ad Reinhardt Foundation. Organized by curator Robert Storr, this will be the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of Reinhardt’s work.

The gallery will release several art historical publications on the occasion of the exhibition, including a fully illustrated catalogue of Reinhardt’s art comics with a new essay by Robert Storr. Storr will be signing copies of Ad Reinhardt How to Look: Art Comics at the gallery on Saturday, November 9, 12 – 1 PM. To reserve a copy, please contact Emily Kamen at 212-517-8677 or emily@davidzwirner.com.

Comprised entirely of works on loan from public and private collections, this exhibition will include the first room of Reinhardt’s "ultimate" black paintings to be seen in New York since the 1991 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reinhardt describes these paintings as: "A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man's outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) no-contrasting (colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free-hand, painted surface (glossless, textureless, non-linear, no hard-edge, no soft edge) which does not reflect its surroundings—a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti-art)."

In addition to the black paintings, the exhibition will feature Reinhardt’s cartoons and photographic slides.

For Reinhardt, cartoons were a humorous platform for satirical observations about the art world, and culture and society more broadly. He created them for various publications throughout his career, most notably for the progressive daily newspaper P.M., where his "How to Look" series first appeared in 1946.

The exhibition will include one of the most extensive presentations of Reinhardt’s slides to date. During the last two decades of his life, Reinhardt produced over 12,000 color slides, mostly from photographs that he took during his extensive travels, and supplemented with some images from magazines and museum collections. He often presented them in lecture-format slideshows or, as he referred to them, "non-happenings."

The gallery will release several publications on the occasion of the exhibition, including a fully illustrated catalogue of Reinhardt’s art comics with a new essay by Robert Storr. In addition, art historian Alex Bacon has prepared a pamphlet on the black paintings, and Prudence Peiffer has prepared one on the slides. Both will be available in the gallery. In the spring of 2014, the gallery will publish a monograph on Reinhardt’s work, which will include historical documentation, an extensive chronology of the artist’s life, and new scholarship by Robert Storr.

During his lifetime, Reinhardt (1913–1967) was affiliated with a number of historically significant galleries, including Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, where his work was shown regularly from 1946 through the 1960s; Galerie Iris Clert, Paris; and Dwan Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, where he had a number of solo shows and where his work was presented in 10, the seminal 1966 exhibition that he organized with Robert Smithson and Robert Morris, and also included works by Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, and Michael Steiner.

Reinhardt’s work was included in important museum exhibitions during his lifetime, including Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States (1944), Cincinnati Art Museum; Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (1951–52), Americans 1963 (1963–64), and The Responsive Eye (1965–66), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors (1955–56), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: 1954–64 (1964), Tate Gallery, London; and Black, White and Grey (1969), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; among others. At the end of 1966, Sam Hunter, with the assistance of Lucy Lippard, mounted a major retrospective of his work at The Jewish Museum, New York.

Posthumous museum exhibitions of Reinhardt’s work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (1977-78); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1980); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1980-81); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1984); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (1985); and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in 1991–92. More recent exhibitions have taken place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (2011–12); Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop (2010–11); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2011). A selection of Reinhardt’s paintings were recently included in the exhibitions Abstract Expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010–11); Blacks: Louise Nevelson, Ad Reinhardt, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Japan (Spring 2013); and Letzte Bilder: Von Manet bis Kippenberger, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (Spring 2013).