David Zwirner is pleased to announce

Déménagement, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by

American artist Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) at the gallery’s Paris location. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes,

this presentation is Saunders’s second solo exhibition with David Zwirner and marks the artist’s first

exhibition in Paris in twenty years.

Saunders once called Paris—where he kept a studio, spent summers, and regularly exhibited during the

1990s and 2000s—“a home away from home,” embracing the French capital as a generative place for

art making and community building. The city offered a hopeful environment and freer way of life with

fewer of the social and racial constraints endemic to American culture, one that held opportunities for

artists to be in broader conversation with audiences and institutions at large. Saunders acted on this by

opening his studio as a residency of sorts to his students visiting from California, offering them some of

the same opportunities that he was given in decades prior.

In February 1994, Saunders helped organize “A Visual Arts Encounter: African Americans & Europe,” a

conference held at the Palais du Luxembourg, Paris, which brought together Black artists, writers,

curators, and intellectuals to discuss the experience of Black American artists in Europe. While

convenings such as this event and others worked to advance this desire and reflected Saunders’s

ongoing dedication to community building, many artists—including Saunders—did not achieve

widespread visibility. Nonetheless, this active circle of international artists and intellectuals formed a

significant group of cultural figures whose impact on the Paris art world followed in the lineage of

kindred expatriate communities before them.

The works in this exhibition bring together Saunders’s extensive formal training with his own

observations and lived experience. A vast range of materials and textures entangle in his compositions

to create unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful, sustained looking and allow for a

vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings. The title—

déménagement (in English, “moving”)—derives

from a collage made in Saunders’s Paris studio that repurposes a box featuring the logo of a French

moving company. While this idea speaks to the artist’s own experience of circulating between

cities—Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Oakland, and Paris, among others—and traveling widely throughout his

career, it also broadly evokes his ongoing method of sourcing materials for his work in the various locales

where he lived and visited, as well as his practice of taking things from one place to another.

Saunders’s dynamic bricolagist approach is evident in the paintings on view in the main gallery.

Generally defined by a monochromatic black ground and square-format composition, these paintings on

wood panel or canvas are often worked over with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional

figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. Enhanced with a typical

range of other markings, materials, and talismans—some directly linked to the artist’s Parisian life—these

compositions demonstrate his singular aesthetic. Many works incorporate motifs that recur throughout

Saunders’s mature oeuvre, such as scrawling text, urnlike vases, and flowers, some resembling nonnative

species whose presence suggests a transatlantic migration.

An adjacent gallery space contains a focused installation of intimate, elegantly restrained depictions of

flowers rendered in watercolor and graphite on white paper. Sparse, graceful, and a surprising

counterbalance to the larger, black-ground paintings, these compositions showcase the fine and

occasionally whimsical quality of Saunders’s line. The artist has employed lyrical contours and gestural

marks to depict single or multiple blooms that, grouped together, resemble a chart of floral species or a

collection of flower pressings.

Also exhibited is a selection of paintings made on doors and panels, all of which originate from

Saunders’s time in Paris. These works, which are often displayed leaning against the wall, further blur the

boundaries between painting and assemblage and open themselves to additional layers of meaning.

Installed together, these tall, towering paintings inhabit a physicality that suggests both presence and

displacement—embodying an artist who works across mediums, formats, and cities to produce an

oeuvre that is at once constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt.

This show anticipates the group exhibition

Paris noir: Circulations artistiques, luttes anticoloniales

1950–2000, which includes work by Saunders and opens at Centre Pompidou, Paris, on March 19, 2025,

as well as the artist’s forthcoming major solo exhibition

Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black

Garden, which opens March 22, 2025, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, before traveling to the

Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California