David Zwirner presents an exhibition of Raymond Saunders (1934–2025) at its Los Angeles gallery, curated by Ebony L. Haynes. This marks Saunders’s third solo show with the gallery and his first major Los Angeles exhibition in over a decade. Celebrating his long life and work in Oakland, California, the show features assemblage-style paintings and works on paper that reflect his signature concerns: starting often with black grounds accented by white chalk (nodding to his teaching career), layered with expressive paint, found objects, signs, vibrant colors, and talismans from urban life. A dedicated educator who viewed teaching and artmaking as intertwined, Saunders infused his work with didactic elements, children’s motifs, and note-taking practices. The exhibition includes intimate collages, drawings, and archival materials from his studio—postcards, ephemera, and mementos—highlighting his archival impulse. His richly textured, improvisatory surfaces evoke life’s complexities, battles, and splendor, as praised by Toni Morrison and Connie H. Choi. The exhibition runs until April 25, 2026.
Raymond Saunders: Notes from LA / David Zwirner Los Angeles. January 24, 2026.
Press text (excerpts): David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Raymond Saunders (1934–2025) at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, this is Saunders’s third solo exhibition with David Zwirner and will mark the first exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the artist’s work in more than a decade.
Celebrating Saunders’s time in California—the artist lived and worked in Oakland for most of his adult life—this exhibition features a selection of paintings and works on paper that embody many of the distinct material and conceptual concerns of the artist’s decades-long practice.
Saunders had close ties to the West Coast, where most of his studio years were spent, and he became well-known as an arts educator there. For Saunders, teaching and artmaking were equal pursuits, and each in turn informed the other, resulting in the frequently didactic, shorthand mode of expression that is a hallmark of his works.
Saunders understood teaching to be, like making art, an ongoing process of learning, and embraced the classroom as a vital site for exchange—of knowledge, of experiences, of ways of seeing the world. He embodied a creative and holistic approach to education that was in part a response to his skepticism around traditional, didactic systems of training. Beginning with his early art training in Pittsburgh’s public schools, Saunders developed a nonhierarchical relationship to pedagogy that came to echo the expansive nature of his artmaking.
“Sights and sounds pass by as one moves along a city street, encountering the world, making decisions, and changing one’s mind as one goes. Such is the beauty of Saunders’s paintings. They are about life and all of its battles and victories, dirtiness and splendor.”
—Connie H. Choi, associate curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, in the exhibition catalogue for Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011–2012
Saunders’s assemblage-style paintings frequently begin with a monochromatic black ground elaborated with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to his decades spent as a teacher—to which he would subsequently add a range of other markings, materials, and talismans.
Expressionistic swaths of paint, minimalist motifs, line drawings, and passages of vibrant color tangle with found objects, signs, and doors collected from his urban environment, creating unexpected visual rhymes and resonances that reward careful and sustained looking.
“From an environment of the lost, the discarded, Saunders creates another wholly inscribed world of found things in which chalk and metal and paint and wallpaper and toys and insignia combine to destabilize and soothe us—then to change us altogether like a tropical medicine belt. Glorious.”
—Toni Morrison in her catalogue introduction for Raymond Saunders, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, California, 1993
Untitled (1996) is exemplary of Saunders’s late style, which is loosely characterized by the artist’s embrace of a more limited palette and the occasional employment of a white ground instead of his signature black. It Wasn’t Easy Being a First Grader (1979/1984) incorporates motifs that speak to Saunders’s lifelong role as an educator.
As seen here, he often included children’s drawings and children’s book illustrations as part of the collaged elements in his compositions. The title of the present work overtly references grade school and the growing pains of youth, with the inclusion of crayons, cursive handwriting, and number tables appearing as emblems of early education.
As well as an artist and a teacher, Saunders was a committed correspondent. Along with his large-scale, assemblage-style paintings, Saunders also made works on paper and intimate collages whose mixed materials point to the artist’s practices of note-taking—an extension of his mark-making that encompassed scribbling notes to himself, giving notes to his students, receiving notes from colleagues and friends—and the related routine of collecting.
His collages—which, along with graphite and watercolor drawings, were the subject of his first major museum presentation in a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1971—are intimately scaled, elegant, and restrained compositions defined by the fine and occasionally whimsical quality of Saunders’s line. The artist employs lyrical contours and cryptic gestural marks to depict abstracted figures, text-like inscriptions, and organic objects such as plants, flowers, or vegetables.
Saunders was an archivist who gathered and kept objects and mementos both personal and cultural, precious and abandoned, and these materials appear throughout his work. This throughline is underscored by an illustrative selection of archival materials from his Oakland studio, which are displayed in vitrines installed in the gallery space and further demonstrate the artist’s lifelong impulse to annotate, keep in touch, and accumulate.
These materials include selections from Saunders’s extensive collection of postcards, photographs, and stamps, as well as ephemera from exhibitions, conferences, and classes, among other documents from the artist’s life, one that produced a rich archive both professional and personal.
Saunders’s tall, towering paintings inhabit a physicality that suggests both presence and displacement—embodying an artist who worked across mediums, formats, and cities to produce an inimitable and ever-evolving oeuvre. At once deliberately constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt, Saunders’s richly built surfaces conjure the fullness of life and its complications, allowing for a vast and nuanced multiplicity of meanings.
