World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1972, Dutch
Softcover, 32 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
$140.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue produced on the occasion of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo's exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 25 Feb - 9 April 1972. "Pollution, Cultivation, New Ecology, Your Portrait", designed by Wim Crouwel (Total Design), features beautiful photo documentation of the artist's works of sculptural assemblage, his happenings, installations, etc. along with texts in Dutch, all wrapped in an original two-colour silk-screened card cover of drawings by Tetsumi Kudo. Scarce.
In his wide-ranging practice, Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935–1990) promoted environmental awareness through found object assemblages, reminiscent of gardens, and cubes that seemed to contain vast inner worlds in states of metamorphosis. A staunch antimodernist, he freely sampled abject imagery, like feces, eyeballs, breasts, and penises, presented in combination with household objects, transistors, and early electronics, to criticize the rampant consumerism of the postwar recovery. Kudo, who was an early proponent of performance-based painting, was an important figure of Tokyo’s “Anti-Art” movement before relocating to Paris in 1962, where he gained recognition for the Happenings he staged and began making art in the vein of Nouveau Réalisme. His lasting legacy can be traced in such artists as Paul McCarthy and Takashi Murakami, who once called him “the father of us all.”
Very Good copy.
2020, English
Hardcover, 180 pages, Dimensions 23.9 x 31.5 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$99.00 - Out of stock
Sensuality and abjection in the sculpture of an artist who expressed the female experience unapologetically and presciently.
This catalog considers the pivotal turning points in the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow's (1926-73) life and career from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It considers her experimental approach to materials, ranging from plaster and bronze to her groundbreaking use of polyester resin in the mid-1960s. Szapocznikow's work maps her engagement with her own body as it transformed from healthy to ailing. Her art amounts to a powerful meditation on what she once described as "a fleeting instant, a trivial instant ... our terrestrial passage." These sensual casts and sculptures of body parts are ecstatic and abject, playful and disturbing, direct and elusive. Unapologetic in their expression of the female experience, including that of terminal illness, Szapocznikow's works remain hauntingly relevant today. Featuring new photography, the publication aims to render the tactility and spatiality of these works in brilliant new detail.
2022, English
Hardcover, 268 pages, 19.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Siglio Press / Los Angeles
$80.00 - In stock -
A biography by Nicole Rudick told in Saint Phalle's own words, assembled from rare and unseen materials.
Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance--a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation--her bringing to life--writes Rudick, is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle's life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness.
Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23, pursuing a revelatory vision informed both by the monumental works of Antonin Gaudí and the Facteur Cheval, and by aspects of her own life. In addition to her Tirs ("shooting paintings") and Nanas and her celebrated large-scale projects--including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany--Saint Phalle produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with her family, marriage to Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with Jean Tinguely, numerous health crises and her late, productive years in Southern California. Saint Phalle has most recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2015, and at MoMA P.S.1, in 2021.
Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature and comics has been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum and elsewhere. She was managing editor of the Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter's legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021).
1994, French
Softcover, 158 pages, 28.7 × 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fondation pour l'Architecture / Brussels
$190.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first Belgian edition of "L'Utopie du Tout Plastique 1960-1973", published in Brussels in 1994 by Fondation pour l'Architecture. Long out of print, this comprehensive volume quickly became an invaluable bible for plastic collectors of the 1960s, 1970s period. In 1994, on the occasion of a major exhibition in Brussels, editors Philippe Decelle, Diane Hennebert, and Pierre Loze compiled the most detailed printed survey of plastic products to date, from Art, Functional Furniture, Fiberglass, Inflatable PVC, Transparent PMMA, Pop and Radical Design, Cookware, Electronics, Mod Fashions, Utopian Arhitecture. Heavily researched and lavishly illustrated throughout with close to 200 of the finest examples, L’ Utopie has become the standard reference on 1960s plastic design - an essential aid in identifying the designers, companies and manufacture details of many classic plastic objects from this era.
Includes detailed biographies of the artists, designers, architects, manufacturers, plus a chronology and bibliography.
Translated blurb:
"The sixties are marked by unprecedented prosperity and technological progress. To this optimism corresponds an extraordinary freedom of creation until the oil crisis of 1973 which tempers this enthusiasm. The vogue of plastic is linked to this society of abundance. Yellow, red, orange, soft, hard, inflatable, it identifies with cheap, serial and disposable productions. Starting from a private collection unique in the world, the book offers a selection of plastic objects created between 1960 and 1973. Tupperware box, Kelton watch, Courrèges dress, Ettore Sottsass portable typewriter Valentine for Olivetti, first chair of Verner Panton, Joe Colombo ABS plastic chair, Niki de Saint Phalle's Nana, Caesar's Compression, cupola of the United States Pavilion by Richard Buckminster Fuller at the Montreal World's Fair or Frei Otto and Günter Behnisch overhead roof for the stadium of the Olympic Games in Munich, all show their diversity, their spirit and sometimes their beauty of the inventiveness of the time."
Features the work of Pierre Paulin, Sergio Mazza, Vico Magistretti, César, Studio 65, Nicola L, Piero Gilardi, Verner Panton, Arman, Gianfranco Frattini, Jonathan De Pas, Donato d'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi, Gae Aulenti, Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Joe Colombo, Enzo Mari, Iseo Hosoe, Mario Bellini, Dorothée Maurer-Becker, Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi, Günter Beltzig, Maurice Calka, Eero Aarnio, Wendell Castle, Alberto Rosselli, Quasar Khanh, Rossi Molinary, Ennio Lucini, Ugo la Pietra, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Archizoom, Roy Adzak, Studio Gruppo 14, Dieter Rams, Reinhold Weiss, Marco Zanuso, Rodolfo Bonetto, Roger Tallon, Pierre Cardin, Courreges, Frei Otto, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Maneval, Paolo Soleri, Archigram, and many more.
Very Good copy, only light wear and edge tanning.
1969, Czech / French
Softcover, 44 pages + 1 page colour insert, 17.5 cm x 24.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
National Gallery / Prague
$45.00 - In stock -
Scarce 1969 Czech Martial Raysse catalogue, published on the occasion of a solo exhibition at the National Gallery in Prague in 1969. Illustrated throughout with examples of Raysse's sculptural assemblages, paintings, neons, and installations, alongside texts by Otto Hahn, Pierre Restany and Martial Raysse, biography, exhibition history, bibliography. All texts in French and Czech. Very lovely catalogue. Includes loose-leaf single colour plate, also.
Martial Raysse (b. 1936) is a French artist and actor born in Golfe-Juan to a ceramicist family in Vallauris. He began to paint and write poetry at age 12 and in 1958, he exhibited some of his paintings with Jean Cocteau at Galerie Longchamp. Fascinated by the beauty of plastic, he plundered low-cost shops with plastic items and developed what became his "vision hygiene" concept; a vision that showcases consumer society. This work received attention and critical praise in 1961, and at a commercial gallery in Milan, his exhibition sold out 15 minutes before the opening. Raysse then traveled to the United States and naturally became involved with the pop art scene in New York City. In October 1960, Raysse, together with Arman, Yves Klein, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé and the art critic and philosopher Pierre Restany founded the group Nouveaux Réalistes. The group was later joined by César, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle and Christo. This group of artists defined themselves as bearing in common a "new perspective approaches of reality". Their work was an attempt at reassessing the concept of art and the artist in the context of a 20th-century consumer society by reasserting the humanistic ideals in the face of industrial expansion.
Very Good copy.
2019, English
2 softcover volumes in hard slipcase, 288 pages, 19.7 x 26 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$99.00 - In stock -
This two-volume publication highlights two key threads in the work of artist Piero Manzoni, a seminal figure of postwar Italian art and progenitor of Conceptualism. The first volume, ‘Materials,’ covers Manzoni’s years of prolific creation leading up to his untimely death in which he experimented with a wide variety of media in his paintings, including sewn cloth, cotton wool, fiberglass, synthetic and natural fur, straw, cobalt chloride, stones, fluorescent polystyrene, pellets, packaging, and more. The second volume, ‘Lines,’ delves into the eponymous body of work of fundamental importance to his well-known Achromes – paintings without color, which aimed to strip his work of expression. Extensively illustrated, both volumes feature art historical essays alongside a host of archival material, making this one of the most comprehensive sources on the artist to date.
Texts by Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, Luca Bochicchio, Chiara Cappelletto, Daniela Ferrari, Flaminio Gualdoni, Laura Hoptman, Gaspare Luigi Marcone, Jack McGrath, and Luisa Mensi.
Book design: Teo Schifferli
2021, English
Hardcover, 184 pages, 27 x 23 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$74.00 - Out of stock
How the celebrated Surrealist traversed the many movements of 20th-century art with a thrilling disregard for categories and constraints.
Over the course of her protean career, Meret Oppenheim produced witty, unconventional bodies of work that defy neat categorizations of medium, style and subject matter. “Nobody will give you freedom,” she stated in 1975, “you have to take it.” Her freewheeling, subversively humorous approach modeled a dynamic artistic practice in constant flux, yet held together by the singularity and force of her creative vision.
Published in conjunction with the first ever major transatlantic Meret Oppenheim retrospective, and the first in the United States in over 25 years, this publication surveys work from the radically open Swiss artist’s precocious debut in 1930s Paris, the period during which her notorious fur-lined Object in MoMA’s collection was made, through her post–World War II artistic development, which included engagements with international Pop, Nouveau Réalisme and Conceptual art, and up to her death in 1985. Essays by curators from the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Modern Art critically examine the artist’s wide-ranging, wildly imaginative body of work, and her active role in shaping the narrative of her life and art, providing the context for her creative production pre– and post–World War II.
About the Authors:
Nina Zimmer is the Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern. Natalie Dupêcher is Assistant Curator of Modern Art at The Menil Collection, TX. Anne Umland is The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lee Colón is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
Meret Oppenheim was born in 1913 and lived in Germany and Switzerland during her childhood. At the age of 18, she moved to Paris to study art, and there exhibited alongside members of the Surrealist group. Oppenheim returned to Switzerland in 1937, where she trained as a conservator at the Basel School of Design. Already a storied member of the pre–World War II avant-garde, in the last two prolific decades of her life she was embraced by a younger generation of artists for her conceptual approach to art and progressive views on gender. Oppenheim died in 1985.
2019, English
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
Ed. of 2500,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
Broken Music is an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and originally published in 1989 by DAAD. Broken Music focuses on recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by thousands of artists between WWII and 1989.
It also includes essays by both editors as well as Theodor W. Adorno, René Block, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, and Hans Rudolf Zeller, as well as a flexi disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak’s “Broken Music.” The centerpiece of the publication is a nearly 200-page bibliography of artists’ records.
Works chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: (1) record covers created as original work by visual artists; (2) record or sound-producing objects (multiples/editions/sculptures); (3) books and publications that contain a record or recorded-media object; and (4) records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists.
Artists documented in the volume include Vito Acconci, albrecht/d., Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Arman, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Claus van Bebber, John Bender, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Claus Böhmler, Christian Boltanski, KP Brehmer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fischli and Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Holger Hiller, Richard Huelsenbeck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Servie Janssen, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Thomas Kapielski, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Cheri Knight, Milan Knizak, Richard Kriesche, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Annea Lockwood, Paul McCarthy, Meredith Monk, Josef Felix Müller, Piotr Nathan, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Frank O’Hara, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, A.R. Penck, Tom Phillips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Gerhard Richter, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Robert Rutman, Sarkis, Thomas Schmit, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, Selten Gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Strafe für Rebellion, Jean Tinguely, Moniek Toebosch, Tristan Tzara, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Walsh, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Ursula Block is a curator living in Berlin, Germany. From 1981 until 2014, she ran gelbe Musik, a gallery and record shop in Berlin that featured work by artists at the crossroads between music and art.
Michael Glasmeier is a professor, writer, and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Since the early 1980s, he has curated dozens of shows that explore the intersection between the visual arts, music, film, and language.
2011, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 27 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hazland Holland-Hibbert / London
$45.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Now scarce catalogue published by Hazland Holland-Hibbert, London, on the occasion of the presentation of "Barbara Hepworth: Unique Sculptures / Bridget Riley: Early Paintings" at Art Basek 2011. Illustrated throughout, inc. fold-outs, with works by both artists and biographies.
Very Good copy.
2021, English / German
Softcover, 356 pages, 26 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Fridericianum / Kassel
Koenig Books / London
$100.00 - Out of stock
Bottled humanism, coloured neon contaminations, tattered flaps of skin, and limp penises bring humanist self-assurance crashing to the ground. What appears as poison or chemical devastation is in fact an appeal to understand metamorphosis as a state of being.
Over a period of three decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935–1990) created a consistent body of work that serves as a model for contemporary conceptual approaches of Posthumanism and the New Materialism. The artist reflects upon the ideological boundaries between mankind, nature, and technology from the distanced perspective of an unsentimental observer.
In Japan, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced a caesura; their devastating effects revealed the vulnerability of the human organism. Nuclear disaster is equivalent to a demonstration of both absolute power and loss of control, exposing the paradox inherent in Humanism. Consequently, it becomes necessary to transform the human being. Kudo demonstrates how body parts, plants, and electrical devices converge to form post-human structures.
This catalogue brings together contributions by artists (such as Mike Kelley) and theorists and documents Kudo’s comprehensive oeuvre in work and archive images as well as exhibition views from the retrospective.
Published after the 2016/17 retrospective exhibition at Fridericianum, Kassel.
English and German text.
2020, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 19 x 28 cm
Published by
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art / Denmark
$59.00 - Out of stock
The eerily prescient work of a near-forgotten Japanese artist, whose 1960s and ’70s sculptures anticipate contemporary ecological anxieties. Edited by Lærke Rydal Jørgensen and Tine Colstrup. Texts by Tetsumi Kudo and Joshua Mack.
Contemplating Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s (1935-90) work in the 21st century provokes a sense of the uncanny on multiple levels: grotesquely beautiful on their own, his abject sculptures seem to foretell today’s environmental concerns with their depictions of ecological decay. Born in Osaka, Kudo’s life was greatly impacted by the aftermath of the atomic bomb in 1945; this trauma compounded by the Vietnam War’s ever-present atmosphere of destruction led to a consistent focus on dystopia and decomposition in his work.
Kudo’s fluorescent birdcages and blacklight terrariums are furnished with an assortment of sculptures and found objects: melted plastic flowers, colorful phallic chrysalises and dismembered resin body parts come together to convey a distinctly modern anxiety in regard to our ailing world. Kudo’s work does not intend to provide comfort in the midst of crisis; rather, his pieces urge viewers to reflect on how we may or may not continue to survive in a world that we ourselves have ruined through pollution and consumerism.
As the artist’s work reaches a peak of topicality, this volume presents a focused selection of Kudo’s pieces from the 1960s and 1970s that demonstrate a postwar awareness of the atomic bomb’s effect on reproduction and the environment.
1970, Dutch
Hardcover, unpaginated, 27.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nederlandse Stichting Openbaar Kunstbezit / Netherlands
$45.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1970 by Dutch art historian and critic Carel Blotkamp (b. 1945), Na de beeldenstorm: drie opstellen over recente beeldende kunst (3 essays on recent visual art) surveys developments in art at the height of one of the most innovative periods in art history, the 1960s. Blotkamp traces the influence of historical avant gardes (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, Duchamp...) into new abstraction, hard-edge, Color Field, Minimalism, Pop, Op Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Art Povera, Land Art, et al. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with fine examples of work by Barnett Newman, Josef Albers, Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Daan Van Golden, Richard Serra, Kenneth Nolan, Morris Louis, Jo Baer, Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Walter de Maria, Yves Klein, Robert Morris, Bridget Riley, Jasper Johns, Lawrence Weiner, Jan Dibbets, Armando, Panamarenko, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Poons, Barry Flanagan, JCJ Vanderheyden, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Martial Raysse, Richard Long, Wim T. Schippers, Marcel Duchamp, Michael Heizer, Ger van Elk, Mario Merz, Carl Andre, Pieter Engels, Andy Warhol, Edward Rushca, Jesús Rafael Soto, Peter Struycken, and many more...
Very Good copy without dust jacket (as issued), light tanning/wear to glossy, foiled boards.
2021, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 30 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
This extensive hardcover overview of Swiss Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri's (b. 1930) 60-year-long career, presents reproductions of archival material as well as rarely seen artworks from Spoerri's incredible artistic history of installations, assemblages, (including his famous "snare works"), performances, editions, and other activities as a protagonist of Fluxus, Nouveau réalisme and Eat Art. Includes texts by Ingried Brugger, Veronika Rudorfer, Hans Peter Hahn, Barbara Räderscheidt, Daniel Spoerri, Katerina Vatsella.
2013, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 72 pages, 21 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Pace London / London
$140.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce copy of this rare and unprecedented overview of Paul Thek works from the early to mid 1960's, across all the media he worked, and never seen before to this extent in the UK. The exhibition, curated by Kenny Schachter, includes works from the noted newspaper series to the legendary and singular 'Technological Reliquary' series.
An American sculptor, painter, and installation artist, Paul Thek (1933-1988) is primarily known for hyper-realistic works of human body parts executed in fleshlike beeswax and for his strongly symbolic, room-size installations constructed from transitory materials. A major figure on the 1960s New York art scene, Thek also spent time in Europe, where he paved the way for artists adopting collaborative strategies. Although he gained a large following and was featured in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions, the anti-establishment "artist's artist" was practically forgotten at the time of his death from AIDS related illness in New York City in 1988, aged 54.
As New copy.
2017, English
Hardcover, 792 pages, 17.3 x 26.3 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Created by curator Mathieu Copeland and artist Balthazar Lovay, together with a stellar list of contributors, The Anti-Museum presents the first extensive exploration of the radical and paradoxical concept that is ‘the anti-museum’ – a term so present in Art History and yet that has never been the object of an investigation and definition.
The museum is constantly a target for criticism, whether it comes from artists, thinkers, curators, or even the public. From the avant-gardes of the twentieth century up to present day, the museumʼs suspect position has generated countless gestures, iconoclastic actions, scathing attacks, utopias, and alternative exhibition spaces.
For the first time, this anthology is devoted to the anti-museum, through anti-art, the anti-artist, anti-exhibition, as well as anti-architecture, anti-philosophy, anti-religion, anti-cinema and anti-music. This notion (unpatented but regularly reappropriated) traces the erratic and sometimes paradoxical counter-history of the contestation of artistic institutions.
From the first anti-exhibition to the first catalogue retracing the history of Closed Exhibitions, from Dada to Noise music, from ‘Everything is Art’ to NO!art, the Japanese avant-gardes to Lettrist cinema, and not forgetting such major protest figures as Gustav Metzger, Henry Flynt, Graciela Carnevale, and Lydia Lunch, The Anti-Museum sketches a polyphonic panorama where negation is accompanied by a powerful breath of life.
This encyclopedic tome includes the work of over 80 artists and writers including Marcel Broodthaers, Maurizio Cattelan, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Smithson, Jean Tinguely, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Yvonne Rainer, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kenneth Goldsmith, George Maciunas, and Bob Nickas.
1973, German
Softcover, 138 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Cologne
$40.00 - Out of stock
Lovely catalogue published by Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Köln, in 1973 to document the museums extensive collection of international contemporary sculpture. Profusely illustrated in black and white with the works of Jean Arp, Paul Thek, Nancy Graves, John Chamberlain, Larry Bell, Carl Andre, Christo, Eva Hesse, Joachim Bandau, Jacques Lipchitz, Louise Nevelson, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Germaine Richier, Schöffer, Bernard Schultze, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), John Tweed, Franz Erhard Walther, Hanns Gasser, Merdardo Rosso, Joseph Beuys, Günter Haese, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Jesús Rafael Soto, Richard Tuttle, Helmut Moos, Bruce Nauman, Ansgar Nierhoff, Jim Dine, Gary Indiana, Karl Zeno Rudolf Schadow, Julio Le Parc, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, G. F. Ris, George Segal, Nicolas Schöffer, Anthony Caro, Eduardo Paolozzi, Jean Tinguely, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Arman, Claes Oldenburg, Marisol Escobar, Niki Saint-Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack, Wolf Vostell, Miguel Ortiz Berrocal, Pol Bury, Erwin Heerich, Horst-Egon Kalinowski, Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff, Johann Gottfried Schadow, Honoré Daumier, Gasser, Adolf von Hildebrand, Max Klinger, Rosso, Aristide Maillol, Tweed, Julio González, Pablo Picasso, Henri Laurens, and many more... Texts in German.
Very Good copy.
2009, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 22.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
The Everyday Press / London
$70.00 - In stock -
"In 1952 the 24-year-old Yves Klein left Paris for Japan to pursue his first love; not art but judo. After becoming one of very few Europeans to receive a coveted 4th dan black belt fro the Kodokan in Tokyo, Klein returned to France and opened the Judo Académie de Paris. In 1954 the prestigious firm of Grasset published his book Les Fondements du Judo, illustrated with hundreds of photographs of Klein and the leading Japanese teachers demonstrating the six major Kata of judo. Now this extraordinary work has finally been translated into English."
Yves Klein (1928 – 1962) was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.
First and only English edition, published by The Everyday Press, now long out-of-print. Last copies.
2014, English
Hardcover, 208 pages, 20 x 26 cm
Published by
Aspen Art Museum / Aspen
$85.00 - Out of stock
This volume offers a compelling examination of the surprising conceptual and visual correspondences between the works of these two pivotal artists known for their innovative practices. Klein (1928-1962) was a major figure in postwar art who opened up new possibilities for material, conceptual and performative expression, often touching on the metaphysical. Hammons (born 1943) is a conceptual artist whose works in performance, installation, sculpture, printmaking and other media confront contemporary realities with an often hard-hitting wit. This publication aims not to draw out any notion of influence or direct correlation between these bodies of work, but rather to elucidate a resonance between two artists who both engage transformative processes to invest the humblest of everyday materials with deep aesthetic significance.
1986, Japanese
Softcover (folded cardboard card w. inserted press clippings), 21 x 30 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Gallery Kobayashi / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
Very scarce Tetsumi Kudo exhibition card/publication produced on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Gallery Kobayashi in Ginza, Tokyo, in 1986. Alongside a detail shot of one of Kudo's "Chromosomes and Souls", and a text in Japanese, inserted into the folded card are copies of press clippings from Japanese newspapers relating to the exhibition.
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1935 Kudo first gained notoriety in the Tokyo art scene of the late 50s. He began exhibiting his work at the Salon of Independents, Yomiuri and had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Blanche, Tokyo. He was awarded the Grand Prize and a travel grant to Paris through his painting participation in the 1962 Second International Young Artists Exhibition in Tokyo. Immigrating to Paris, he immediately started working in a range of media--objects, sculpture, installation, drawing and painting--and presenting numerous Happenings and performances. Kudo's work and activities intersect with many important postwar artistic trends--including French Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus, Pop art, 60s anti-art tendencies and 80s Postmodernism. Throughout his life and career, Kudo remained particularly Japanese while his art and vision were consistently and uniquely transcultural, internationalist and cosmopolitan. His work made international appearances at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1972), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany, (1970), Venice Biennial (1976), and the Biennial São Paulo (1977, awarded a special mention) while also appearing frequently in museums and galleries throughout Japan and France, with a growing recognition in the Netherlands.
1994, Japanese / French
Softcover, 199 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
The National Museum of Art / Osaka
$100.00 - In stock -
Wonderful scarce, out of print monographic catalogue published in conjunction with a show of Tetsumi Kudo's work, held at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, October 6 - November 29, 1994.
Heavily illustrated with text by Keiji Nakamura and Didier Semin. Includes list of works in the exhibition, biography, and bibliography. Black-and-white and colour images throughout.
Text in Japanese and French.
As New copies.
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1935 Kudo first gained notoriety in the Tokyo art scene of the late 50s. He began exhibiting his work at the Salon of Independents, Yomiuri and had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Blanche, Tokyo. He was awarded the Grand Prize and a travel grant to Paris through his painting participation in the 1962 Second International Young Artists Exhibition in Tokyo. Immigrating to Paris, he immediately started working in a range of media--objects, sculpture, installation, drawing and painting--and presenting numerous Happenings and performances. Kudo's work and activities intersect with many important postwar artistic trends--including French Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus, Pop art, 60s anti-art tendencies and 80s Postmodernism. Throughout his life and career, Kudo remained particularly Japanese while his art and vision were consistently and uniquely transcultural, internationalist and cosmopolitan. His work made international appearances at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1972), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany, (1970), Venice Biennial (1976), and the Biennial São Paulo (1977, awarded a special mention) while also appearing frequently in museums and galleries throughout Japan and France, with a growing recognition in the Netherlands.
1969, German
Softcover (stapled), 41 pages, 21 x 20.5 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Felix Handschin Galerie / Basel
$40.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Quite a rare Daniel Spoerri catalogue published for the exhibition of the same name (Spoerri's Max and Morimal Art ...und stahl dem Koch ein Ei (And stole an egg from the cook)) at Felix Handschin Galerie, Basel, 1969. No works by Spoerri are shown in this catalog, instead, very much in Spoerri's character, he has friends and colleagues (artists, poets, collectors) contribute the contents: letters, texts, drawings by Ben Vautier, Robert Filliou, George Brecht, Bernhard luginbühl, Arturo Schwarz, Wolfgang Hahn, Klaus Honnef, Ingeborg Lüscher, Jürg Federspiel, Andre Thomkins, Carlo Schröter, Hanspeter Ricklin etc. Introduction by Spoerri. Texts in German.
Daniel Spoerri (born 27 March 1930 in Galați) is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania. Spoerri is best known for his “snare-pictures,” a type of assemblage or object art, in which he captures a group of objects, such as the remains of meals eaten by individuals, including the plates, silverware and glasses, all of which are fixed to the table or board, which is then displayed on a wall. He also is widely acclaimed for his book, Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard (An Anecdoted Topography of Chance), a literary analog to his snare-pictures, in which he mapped all the objects located on his table at a particular moment, describing each with his personal recollections evoked by the object, with illustrations by the great Roland Topor. In the 1950s he was active in dance, studying classical dance with Olga Preobrajenska and in 1954 becoming the lead dancer at the State Opera of Bern, Switzerland. He later staged several avant-garde plays including Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and Picasso’s surrealist Desire Trapped by the Tail. During that period he met a number of Surrealist artists, including Meret Oppenheim, Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and also a number of artists subsequently associated with the Fluxus movement, including Robert Filliou, Dieter Roth and Emmett Williams. Closely associated with the Fluxus art movement, a movement “characterized by a strongly Dadaist attitude, [whose] participants were a divergent group of individualists whose most common theme was their delight in spontaneity and humor.” It has been said that his Anecdoted Topography of Chance “seems perfectly to embody aspects of its spirit.” Spoerri was also one of the original signers of the manifesto creating the Nouveau réalisme (New Realism) art movement, which involved artists such as Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Pierre Restany, Niki de Saint Phalle, César, Jean Tinguely, Mimmo Rotella, Gérard Deschamps, and the Ultra-Lettrists, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé, an avant garde endeavor begun in 1960. His use of everyday life as the main subject-matter of his art reflects his involvement in the New Realism movement.
A major theme of Spoerri’s artwork is food, and he has called this aspect of his work “Eat Art.” This is seen not only in his snare-pictures of eaten meals, but in a variety of other contexts. For example, in 1961 he sold in an art-gallery in Copenhagen store-bought canned food which he had signed and rubber-stamped “Attention: Work of Art.” In 1963, he enacted a sort of performance art called Restaurant de la Galerie J in Paris, for which he cooked on several evenings. Art-critics took over the role of waiters, playing on the idea of the critic bringing the art to the consumers and giving them an understanding of the work. On June 18, 1968, Spoerri opened the Restaurant Spoerri in Düsseldorf, and on September 18, 1970, he opened the Eat-Art-Gallery upstairs.He also published in 1970 a diary of his life on the Greek island of Symi, in which he included numerous recipes of the dishes he ate there. Originally titled A Gastronomic Itinerary, it was later republished under the title Mythology & Meatballs.
1974, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$35.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 edition of this collection of writings of Yves Klein, published by The Tate Gallery, on the occasion of an exhibition of the artist's work that same year. The catalogue includes an introduction by Michael Compton and writings by Klein (accompanied by photographs throughout), together with a Chronology and a Catalogue of the works in the exhibition.
Yves Klein (1928 – 1962) was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.
Ex-library copy with some internal stamps/marks not affecting content. Otherwise good throughout.
English / German
Hardcover (linen bound with dust jacket), 324 pages, 29.5 x 23.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Edition Galerie Bruno Bischofberger / Zürich
$340.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the great Jean Tinguely "Catalogue Raisonné Sculptures and Reliefs 1954-1968", published by Edition Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zürich in 1982.
Compiled by Christina Bischofberger over eight years in very close collaboration with Tinguely, this heavy, comprehensive volume collects 448 works made between 1954 and 1968, all provided with illustrations and the appropriate legends for each piece (549 black and white plates in total). All texts in English and German, with an introduction text by Franz Meyer (Director
of the Kunstmuseum in Basel), biography of the artist, list of exhibitions, bibliography, and list of works. Bound in linen with illustrated dust jacket, this immersive book on Tinguely's work is long out of print and very collectible, instantly becoming the most important reference on his work over this crucial period.
Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics. Tinguely's art satirized the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial society. He is associated with the Nouveau Réalisme and Zero art movements.
1968, French
Softcover, 16 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Edition of 1500,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Galerie Cogeime / Brussels
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare early catalogue from 1968, printed in an edition of 1500 copies on the occasion of Alina Szapocznikow's solo exhibition at Galerie Cogeime, Brussels (12 November to 3 December 1968).
Illustrated throughout in black and white, with texts by Pierre Restany and Giuseppe Marchiori and biography of the artist. Beautifully designed by the great Roman Cieślewicz.
Alina Szapocznikow (May 16, 1926 – March 2, 1973), was a Polish sculptor who began working during the postwar period in a classical figurative style, but radically reconceptualized sculpture as an imprint not only of memory but of her own body. Though her career effectively spanned less than two decades (cut short by the artist's premature death in 1973 aged 47), Szapocznikow left behind a legacy of provocative objects that evoke Surrealism, Nouveau Realisme and Pop art. Her tinted polyester casts of body parts, often transformed into everyday objects like lamps or ashtrays; her poured polyurethane forms; and her elaborately constructed sculptures, which at times incorporated photographs, clothing or car parts, all remain as wonderfully idiosyncratic and culturally resonant today as when they were first made.