BOOK:Raymond Saunders-Post No Bills, David Zwirner Books

“Post No Bills”, published by David Zwirner Books, is the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the pioneering artist Raymond Saunders. This long-overdue volume traces the arc of Saunders’s dynamic career, highlighting how his formal training intersects with a deeply personal, observational practice shaped by his lived experiences. Saunders is best known for his richly layered, assemblage-style paintings—works that often begin with a stark, monochromatic black background, sketched over in white chalk. This inversion of the conventional figure-ground relationship serves as a conceptual foundation, one that he then builds upon with an eclectic array of materials: fragments of wallpaper and advertising, discarded rulers and paintbrushes, line drawings, gestural strokes of paint, and found signage. These elements—collected from his surroundings both at home and abroad—collide and harmonize in unexpected ways, creating visual dialogues that invite sustained and careful engagement. The result is work that is simultaneously constructed and spontaneous, intellectual and emotionally charged. Saunders’s compositions teem with visual cues and symbols, evoking a multitude of themes—cultural memory, political critique, spirituality, identity—without ever collapsing into a single interpretation. Each surface he constructs becomes a vibrant site of tension and possibility, rich with meaning for those who take the time to look deeply. The publication accompanies a two-part exhibition held in 2024 at David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps Gallery, and it underscores Saunders’s enduring relevance as both an artist and cultural commentator. Among the highlights is a facsimile of “Black Is a Color”, Saunders’s groundbreaking 1967 pamphlet, which boldly challenged racial essentialism in art and remains a touchstone in conversations around Black artistic expression more than fifty years later.-Efi Michalarou