At David Zwirner New York, Gerhard Richter’s landscapes and Jasper Johns’s process-driven works explore image-making across abstraction, memory and repetition.
Gerhard Richter Landschaften – Showcasing Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, alongside a considered selection of works from his series of Abstrakte Bilder, this exhibition features loans from significant private and museum collections as well as works lent from the artist’s personal collection.
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Jasper Johns?Copy/Trace– Curated by Jeffrey Weiss, this exhibition features drawings and prints spanning the 1960s through the 2010s that demonstrate the various ways Johns has deployed methods of copying and tracing as means of representation.
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of Gerhard Richter’s celebrated photorealist landscape paintings from the 1960s to the 2000s, which are displayed alongside a considered selection of works from his series of Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings, 1976–2017). On view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York, Gerhard Richter: Landschaften is curated by David Zwirner and David Leiber, a partner at the gallery, in close collaboration with the artist. The exhibition features loans from significant private and museum collections, including paintings that were recently on view in the artist’s acclaimed retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2025–2026, as well as works lent from Richter’s personal collection.
Richter began to engage the subject of landscape almost six decades ago in the late 1960s, creating atmospheric compositions based on snapshots from his travels. These paintings evoke art-historical precedents—particularly the work of Caspar David Friedrich—while eschewing traditional notions of the aesthetic sublime. Over the following years, Richter continued to paint landscapes from photographic sources, often working on them at the same time as his Abstract Paintings so that each body of work might inform the underlying pictorial concerns expressed by the other. Displayed in dialogue through a chronological series of rooms each dedicated to a period of the artist’s career, these abstract and representational aspects of Richter’s oeuvre together illustrate his enduring investigation into the nature of images and the perception of reality—how it is personally interpreted, mediated by the external world, and visually portrayed through painting.
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David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by American artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) at the gallery’s West 20th Street location in New York. Conceived by independent curator Jeffrey Weiss, the exhibition focuses on related approaches to process in the artist’s practice, together signified by the terms copy and trace.
On view are drawings and prints spanning the 1960s through the 2010s that demonstrate the various ways Johns has deployed methods of copying and tracing as means of representation—by copying one of his own paintings, by leaving an imprint, or trace, of the body, or by tracing an existing image through a translucent support. Comprising important works borrowed from museums and private collections as well as a selection of loans from Johns’s personal collection, Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace illuminates a significant throughline in the artist’s practice and provides new insights into the relation of meaning to making in his work.
The content throughout this page is excerpted from independent curator and critic Jeffrey Weiss’s exhibition texts. Weiss has written a new scholarly essay titled “Jasper Johns: Copy/Trace” to accompany this exhibition.
Gerhard Richter Landschaften May 7th–July 10th, 2026
Jasper Johns?Copy/Trace May 7th–June 26th, 2026
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Opening reception: Thursday, May 7th, 6PM–8 PM- David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street
