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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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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.
1981, German
Hardcover, 164 pages, 20 x 24.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verlag Klaus G. Renner / Münich
$70.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful album collecting the graphic works of the eccentric, Danzig-born poet, architectural prophet, and proto-surrealist Paul Scheerbart, edited by Machthild Rausch and published by Verlag Klaus G. Renner, Münich. "Beyond Gallery", reproducing his phenomenal illustrations, alongside texts in German, is a comprehensive overview of the visionary "first Expressionist" and master of the fantastique. Highly recommended.
Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart (1863—1915) was a German author of speculative fiction literature and drawings, best remembered through obscure citations from Walter Benjamin, Walter Gropius, and Bruno Taut. From the late 1880s to his premature death in 1915, he wrote prolifically on science, urban planning and design, space travel, and gender politics, often in the course of a single text. His most celebrated treatise, Glass Architecture (Glasarchitektur, 1914) foretold of a sublime, technocratic civilization whose peaceful world-order was borne from the proliferation of crystal cities and floating continents of chromatic glass, a vision summed up in his aphorism: “Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.” Like his French contemporaries Camille Flammarion, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel, and Alfred Jarry, Scheerbart’s prophetic oeuvre oscillated between themes of technology and aesthetics in a genre known in the Francophone world as fantastique.
Very Good copy. No dust jacket.
2021, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 11.4 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$30.00 - In stock -
In 1905 on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance. Returning to German society after a century of absence at the ripe age of 180, the Baron is cajoled into presenting his impressions of the World Fair in Melbourne, Australia. His tales of Melbourne eventually take his audience from a restaurant in the ocean depths to the dwellings of mineral giants in mountain caverns, before culminating in a spiritual voyage to outer space.Over the course of a week, the sprightly Baron arrives nightly by sleighmobile to combat the dreary days with a series of fantastical visions and theories: he discusses mobile architecture, the role of technology in the arts and the need for art to ignore nature in its quest to discover new planetary organs and senses; the new household miracles of vacuum tubes for cleaning and potato-peeling machines; the repressive function of sexuality; and the need for progressive taxation.
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the “wise clown” by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that would influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.
2023, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 19.7 x 13.4 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$42.00 - In stock -
A restless inquiry into the cultural and psychic sources of insomnia by one of contemporary French literature's most elegant voices.
Plagued by insomnia for twenty years, Marie Darrieussecq turns her attention to the causes, implications, and consequences of sleeplessness: a nocturnal suffering that culminates at 4 a.m. and then defines the next day. “Insomniac mornings are dead mornings,” she observes. Prevented from falling asleep by her dread of exhaustion the next day, Darrieussecq turns to hypnosis, psychoanalysis, alcohol, pills, and meditation. Her entrapment within this spiraling anguish prompts her inspired, ingenious search across literature, geopolitical history, psychoanalysis, and her own experience to better understand where insomnia comes from and what it might mean. There are those, she writes, in Rwanda, whose vivid memories of genocide leave them awake and transfixed by complete horror; there is the insomnia of the unhoused, who have nowhere to put their heads down. The hyperconnection of urban professional life transforms her bedroom from a haven to a dormant electrified node.
Ranging between autobiography, clinical observation, and criticism, Sleepless is a graceful, inventive meditation by one of the most daring, inventive novelists writing today.
Translated by Penny Hueston.
Marie Darrieussecq is one of the leading voices in contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was a finalist for France's prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1996 and became an international bestseller. Her 2013 novel Men: A Novel of Cinema and Desire received the Prix Médicis, and her luminous, voluptuous portrait of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, was published in English by Semiotext(e) in 2017. Darrieussecq has also worked as a translator and a psychoanalyst.
1996, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 21.6 x 16.5 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$65.00 - Out of stock
"This book saved my life." So recalls the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran about a book that meditates on madness and death, the absurdity of existence, and the agony of consciousness. Cioran finds in our darkest fears not only reasons to continue living but also the comic, absurd humor in doing so. This early work by Cioran, whom Susan Sontag calls "the most distinguished figure in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, " and Marc Fumaroli recently described as "a legend...a master of French prose, " portrays the philosophical mind in the crisis of its self-consuming fever. Born out of a terrible insomnia which Cioran characterizes as "a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell, " On the Heights of Despair was written in Romania in 1934 at the age of twenty-two. It presents us with the youthful Cioran, who described himself as "a Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician of despair. For Cioran, writing and philosophy are closely related to physical suffering: both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to metaphysical revelation. The result is a book that becomes a substitute for as well as an antidote to suicide. By enacting the struggle of the Romantic soul against God, the universe, and itself, Cioran releases a saving burst of lyrical energy that carries him safely out of his desperation. On the Heights of Despair shows the philosopher's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence.
Emil Mihai Cioran (1911—1995) was a Romanian-born French philosopher and essayist, and author of some two dozen books of savage, unsettling beauty. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. For some, he was one of the most subversive thinkers of his time — a 20th-century Nietzsche, only darker and with a better sense of humor. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, and whimsical, unsystematic, fragmentary style; he is celebrated as one of the great masters of aphorism. He called himself “un homme de fragment.” From the age of 20, Cioran began to suffer from insomnia, a condition which he suffered from for the rest of his life, and permeated his writings. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, avoiding the public, but still maintained contact with numerous friends, including Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux and Fernando Savater.
1984(?) , English
Softcover, 64 pages, 26.5 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
International Cultural Corporation of Australia Limited / Australia
$55.00 - In stock -
Rare Australian catalogue of American artist Philip Guston (1913—1980) published on the occasion of the major touring exhibition in 1984(?) of "The Late Works", curated by John Buckley, exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, August 17-September 16; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, September 26-October 28; Art Gallery of New South Wales, November 7-December 30. Large format softcover with colour plate illustrations of Guston's works dating from 1969—1979. Accompanying texts by Buckley, Edward F. Fry, and Joseph Ablow, and a transcription of a lecture given by Guston in 1978, plus chronology, bibliography and checklist.
Good copy with light cover wear.
2006, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 23.7 x 26.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$70.00 - In stock -
A rare insight into the mind of the greatest portrait painter of our time, accompanied by intimate photographs of the artist at work in his studio.
Lucian Freud is not only the most celebrated artist working in England, but one of the most private. He has frequently stated his reluctance to be photographed and he has almost never agreed to be interviewed. Following the publication of the last ten years of his work by Jonathan Cape in the autumn of 2005, the painter has agreed to talk to Sebastian Smee, a writer on art whom he greatly respects, in a series of conversations rather than formal interviews. He wants to talk about painting itself, the demands of his own work and the painters he admires. ;Two photographers have had access to Freud's studio. The late Bruce Bernard was a friend for many years and the subject of two of Freud's paintings. Bernard was an authority on photography, a great picture editor, and also a very fine photographer. He made a number of studies of Freud at work. Over the last five years in particular, Freud's assistant, the painter David Dawson, has been photographing the artist constantly. The results reveal various stages of works in progress, including paintings of Dawson himself, and the intensity of the activity in this very secret domain. The only precedent to such a document might be David Douglas Duncan's photographs of Picasso at work, but nothing as extensive has been published on such a major painter before.
1977, German
Softcover, unpaginated, 30 x 21 cm
Ed. of 600, signed,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Edition Hundertmark / Berlin
$190.00 - In stock -
First 1977 signed, numbered edition of this wild, occasionally sexually explicit pictorial and literary collaboration between the radical Viennese artists Günter Brus and Dominik Steiger. One of 600 numbered copies, this copy no. 394/600, signed by Brus and Steiger. In the mid-1970s, every Wednesday each of the two artists would receive something from the other on a sheet of paper with which to build a shared work. This is how the series Jeden jeden Mittwoch. Ein Zwoman [Every Every Wednesday. A Novel in Two] arose in 1974, summarised in this 1977 volume of text and images: each double page presents a half, containing either text or drawings, on each side of the fold.
Dominik Steiger (born 1940 in Vienna, died 2014 in Vienna) was an Austrian writer and artist active in the spheres of the Vienna Group and Viennese Actionism. A university drop out, Steiger joined the French foreign legion in 1959 but was dismissed a year later for psychiatric reasons. He is regarded as a significant crossover artist between genres and an important representative of the Austrian avant-garde since the 1950s. From 1961 onwards he lead a vagabond life through Europe and Asia, publishing many books of poetry and prose, in the 1970s exhibiting and publishing drawings and graphic works, his first LP of songs “Wiener Lieder und Gemischte Waisen” was published 1979 by Dieter Roth's Verlag. With artistic contemporaries such as Christian Ludwig Attersee, Hermann Nitsch, Dieter Roth, Arnulf Rainer, and Günter Brus, he developed numerous collaborations throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Günter Brus (born 1938 in Ardning, Austria) is an Austrian artist known for his controversial films, performances, and paintings. He was notably a member of the Viennese Actionist Group alongside Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch. In 1960, the artist’s interest in the paintings of Jackson Pollock led his transition into making performance-based paintings regarding his own body. Many of the Viennese Actionist’s radical acts were intended as reactions to what they considered the ongoing legacy of Nazi fascism in Austrian culture. His 1968 performance Kunst und Revolution, consisted of the artist consuming his own urine, masturbating in public, and vomiting, he was subsequently jailed for six months. Brus currently lives and works in Graz, Austria.
Fine copy.
1972, German
Softcover, 60 pages (plus inserts), 21 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Zürich Kunstgesellschaft / Zürich
$50.00 - Out of stock
Lovely, scarce Daniel Spoerri exhibition catalogue published in 1972 on the occasion of his exhibition at Zurich Kunstgesellschaft - Helmhaus Zurich, April 16 to May 22. Includes detailed biographical notes on Spoerri, a conversation about Spoerri in the CNAC by Claus Bremer, numerous illustrations of his sculptural works, a full list of works, and a detailed chronology and bibliography of Spoerri. Comes with the enclosed seperate prints from the artist's glossary of Switzerland XX. and "The Mythological Travels...", Emmett Williams' "Preface to the Translation of the Symi-Cycle" (8 pages).
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.
Good copy with some buckling and corner warp. Ex-libris (NGV)
1969, German
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 21 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zentrum für aktuelle / Aachen
$50.00 - Out of stock
Scarce early Daniel Spoerri catalogue published on the occasion of his exhibition at Zentrum für aktuelle, Aachen, August 28—September 20, 1969. Illustrated throughout in b/w with Spoerri's assemblages, "snares-pictures" and other works, alongside texts in German, exhibition history and biography/portrait.
Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania. Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures". In 1960, Spoerri made his first "snare-picture": "objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical. Example: remains of a meal are fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed and the table hung on the wall." His first "snare-picture", Kichka's Breakfast was created from his girlfriend's leftover breakfast. The piece is now in the collection in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One snare-picture, made in 1964, consists of the remains of a meal eaten by Marcel Duchamp. 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 restaurant performance pieces, for which he cooks for guests and art-critics take on 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.
Very Good copy.
1990, French
Softcover, 232 pages, 27 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Centre Georges Pompidou / Paris
Musée Picasso / Antibes
$100.00 - Out of stock
One of the best and most comprehensive books on the great Swiss artist, Daniel Spoerri, beautifully put together to accompany a travelling exhibition of his work in 1990/1991 in Paris, Antibes, Wien, München, Genève, Solothurn. Profusely illustrated with Spoerri's incredible artistic history of installations, performances, studio photos, editions, and other activities across important associations with Fluxus, Nouveau réalisme and Eat Art; works across sculpture, assemblage, action, and relief, including a great number of his iconic "snare works". Includes an exhibition history, bibliography and essays (in French). Highly recommended book, long out-of-print.
Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania. Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures". In 1960, Spoerri made his first "snare-picture": "objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical. Example: remains of a meal are fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed and the table hung on the wall." His first "snare-picture", Kichka's Breakfast was created from his girlfriend's leftover breakfast. The piece is now in the collection in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One snare-picture, made in 1964, consists of the remains of a meal eaten by Marcel Duchamp. 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 restaurant performance pieces, for which he cooks for guests and art-critics take on 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.
Very Good, preserved copy.
1982, English / Japanese / Italian / French
Softcover (w. wax dust jacket), 128 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Japan Foundation / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful Japanese catalogue published in 1982 to accompany an exhibition that brought together the work of 5 Western artists (Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Bruce Mclean, and Giulio Paolini) for a major group show held at the Laforet Museum, Tokyo and The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Each artist has many pages of work reproduced in black and white, accompanied by artists' statements, essays on each artist, and artists' biographies, in English, Japanese, Italian and French. Bound in various raw paper stocks and wrapped in printed wax paper dust-jacket.
Good-Very Good copy. Perfectly preserved with small chips and wear to dust jacket edges.
1977, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 26 x 32 cm
Edition of 2000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
ICA / Pennsylvania
$280.00 - Out of stock
The great, and very rare, Paul Thek "Processions" catalogue from 1977.
"Processions (: The Tower of Babel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bandwagon, The Burning Bridge, Bo Jangles, Jack Lantern, Paul Thek, Zhivago)" was published on the occasion of the exhibition "Paul Thek -
Processions" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 30 October to 4 December 1977. This handsome, heavily illustrated catalogue is a very important title in the history of Thek's work as it was the only published document dedicated to his immersive, site-specific installations. Selected and arranged by Thek with curator Suzanne Delehanty, these pages help capture the most conceptually complicated and complete environments created by Thek to that date, including The Tomb-Death of a Hippie (1967), A Procession in Honor of Aesthetic Progress... (1968), The Procession/The Artist's Co-op (1969), Pyramid/A Work in Progress (1971-72), A Station of the Cross (1972), Ark, Pyramid (1972), Ark, Pyramid, Easter (1973), and more, along with his Technological Reliquaries (1965-1967), Fishman (1968), works on paper and bronze sculpture (1973-1977), list of exhibitions, bibliography, text by Suzanne Delehanty and more.
A must for any Thek collection. Published once in an edition of 2000 copies. Now very rarely seen.
1969, English / Dutch
Illustrated 10-page fold-out (w. loose leaf inserts), 27 × 83 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
$240.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare early Paul Thek Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam catalogue, published in 1969. Designed by Wim Crouwel (Total Design) in the form of a 10-page illustrated leporello fold-out of Thek's installations and sculptures and published with SM no. 460. One of the hardest of all Stedelijk Museum catalogues to find, this copy comes complete with the often missing SM biographical/interview/text insert, and also the loose strip inlay with text advertising ‘a document made by Paul Thek and Edwin Klein’ (published that same year), making it a most complete copy available.
Very Good-Fine with all included, preserved in plastic sleeve.
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.
1970, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.3 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMA / New York
$600.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1970 edition of MoMA's landmark book on conceptual art, published to accompany this groundbreaking avant-garde show.
In the summer of 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted the now legendary exhibition Information, one of the first surveys of conceptual art. Conceived by MoMA’s celebrated curator Kynaston McShine as an “international report” on contemporary trends, the show and attendant catalog together assembled the work of more than 150 artists from 15 countries to explore the parameters and possibilities of the emerging art practices of the era. Noting the participating artists’ attunement to the “mobility and change that pervades their time,” McShine underscored their interest in “ways of rapidly exchanging ideas, rather than embalming the idea in an ‘object.’” Indeed, much of the work in the exhibition engaged mass-communications systems, such as broadcast television and the postal service, and addressed viewers directly, often encouraging their participation in return.
The catalog, rather than merely document the show, functioned autonomously: it included a list of recommended reading, a chance-based index by critic Lucy Lippard, and individual artist contributions in the form of photographic documentation, textual description, drawings and diagrams—some relating to work in the exhibition and others to artworks as yet unrealized.
Artists include Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Keith Arnatt, Art & Language Press, Art & Project, Richard Artschwager, David Askevold, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, John Baldessari, Michael Baldwin, Barrio, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, Bernhard & Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Bill Bollinger, George Brecht, Stig Broegger, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, James Lee Byars, Jorge Luis Carballa, Christopher Cook, Roger Cutforth, Carlos D'Alessio, Hanne Darboven, Walter de Maria, Jan Dibbets, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Group Frontera, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Giorno Poetry Systems, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Ira Joel Haber, Randy Hardy, Michael Heizer, Hans Hollein, Douglas Huebler, Robert Huot, Peter Hutchinson, Richards Jarden, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, Cildo Campos Meirelles, Marta Minujin, Robert Morris, N.E. Thing Co., Bruce Nauman, New York Graphic Workshop, Newspaper, Group Oho, Helio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Giulio Paolini, Paul Pechter, Giuseppe Penone, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Alejandro Puente, Markus Raetz, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Edward Ruscha, J.M. Sanejouand, Richard Sladden, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Erik Thygesen, John Van Saun, Guilherme Magalhaes Vaz, Bernar Venet, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson.
Kynaston McShine was formerly Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Very Good copy. Light cover wear, single spine crack, all crisp, clean interior and tightly bound copy of a book that usually sees serious page detachments. Best copy we have seen.
2001, English
Softcover, 420 pages, 28.1 x 21.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Richter Verlag / Dusseldorf
$220.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the now out-of-print Dan Graham catalogue raisonne, published to accompany a major traveling exhibition held from 13 January to 25 March 2001 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Serralves, 21 June to 30 September at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris from 25 November to 10 February 2002 in Kroller Müller Museum in Otterlo and May to August 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki.
Since the 1960s, Dan Graham has carved out a unique space in the field of contemporary art, combing his work as an artist and as a critic of architecture and art in a unique fusion of theory and practice. From the outset, Graham engaged seriously with the aesthetic and political ramifications of Structuralism, taking the artist's critical perceptions of reality to an increasingly conceptual level. His early articles grappled with the question of architecture, arguing that behind the high-rise apartment complexes and housing projects spreading over the Western world lay the phenomenon of economic and social rationalization. Since the beginning of the 1970s Graham has pursued these and other observations with installations, videos, films and large-scale pavilions that serve as thought-models for his critical insights.
This catalogue raisonne provides a comprehensive, chronological documentation of 165 works and writings from 1965 until the present day, and includes articles, written sketches, Graham's reports about his artistic activities, art critical essays, film stills, architectural models, pavilions and video rooms, as well as an extensive bibliography. With essays by preeminent critic/philosophers Benjamin Buchloh and Thierry de Duve, among others, the result is a complete and edifying look at one of the premier artist-scholars of the past thirty years.
VG in VG dust jacket with some shelf rubbing, preserved now under mylar wrap.
2009, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 360 pages, 21 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Ediciones Polígrafa / Barcelona
$140.00 - In stock -
Since the mind-1960s, Dan Graham (Urbana, Illinois 1942) has produced an important body of art and theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historial, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. He is a highly influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both as a practitioner of conceptual art and a well-versed art critic and theorist. Graham s work questions the relationship between people and architecture and the psychological effects it has on us. His work highlights the awkwardness that occurs when intimate moments or details are rudimentarily broadcast in an impersonal manner, as he continues to investigate the voyeuristic act of seening onself reflected, whilst at the same time watching others. This monograph analyzes his main works and collects some of seminal writings by the artist.
With a text by Alexander Alberro.
First English hardcover edition, now out-of-print.
1965, French
Softcover, 34 pages, 21 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Alexander Iolas / Paris
$65.00 - Out of stock
Lovely catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Un Hommage a Wols" at Alexandre Iolas Gallery, Paris, in February 1965. Illustrated throughout with the paintings and drawings of German painter and photographer Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, alongside an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's text "Wols in person", Gallery Europe, Paris. This copy includes "Oevres exposées" booklet inserted, listing the works exhibited at the Galerie Alexandre Iolas. Texts in French.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Very Good copy with light tanning.
2019, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 16.5 x 23.6 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$28.00 - Out of stock
"Beyond the Humanity" is a new publication by Japanese artist Yoshifumi Hayashi, published in 2019 by Innen Books in Zürich on the occasion of TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR 2019 at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, July 12 – July 15, 2019.
Contemporary Japanese erotic artist Yoshifumi Hayashi (b. 1948, Fukuoka, Japan) dropped out of Chuo University Department of Philosophy in 1972, moving to Paris in 1974, where he began to produce pencil drawings through self study. At first his main influence was the metaphysical world of De Chirico, but soon his focus shifted to the lower half of the female anatomy. Exhibiting and publishing his drawings in France in the late 1970's, Hayashi gained a cult following for his dark explorations of fetishized female physiology and mutating genitalia, rendered masterfully in pencil. Often mentioned in relation to the likes of Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger, and even David Cronenberg, Hayashi's drawings were featured in specialist fetish magazines, and director Walerian Borowczyk even made a film in 1980 of the artist at work, yet still little is known about Hayashi, who continues to work and exhibit internationally.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 16.5 x 23.6 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$28.00 - Out of stock
Sibylle Ruppert's "Autodévoration" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2023. First Edition. Supported by Blue Velvet Projects.
Sibylle Ruppert (1942, Frankfurt — 2011, Paris) created a radical oeuvre of paintings, drawings and collages throughout the 60's, 70's and 80's in a brutal aesthetic between dark surrealism, eroticism and an intimate but fierce processing of her own private traumas. Ruppert was born during an air raid on September 8th, 1942. It was the night of the first massive bombing of Frankfurt during World War II. In 1959, at the age of 17, Sibylle was admitted to the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Shortly after, she left for Paris, where she enrolled in a ballet school. During a visit to New York, she decided to give up her dancing career, returned to Europe and became a full-time artist. In the 80’s she started giving art classes in prisons, mental hospitals, and drug addiction rehabilitation centers. Her large format charcoal drawings and etchings are all characterized by an extremely detailed and elaborate depiction. Her oeuvre is inspired by the morbid and obscene writings of Marquis de Sade, Lautréamont and Georges Bataille. As well as the literary influences cited above visual traces and echoes can be observed of Hieronymus Bosch, H.R. Giger, Henry Fuseli, Hans Bellmer, William Blake and Francis Bacon, though this does not in any way detract from her singularly visceral and kinetic imagination. In her surrealistic works, the bodily depictions are always in motion; writhing, straining, collapsing, and seemingly undergoing a monstrous transformation from human anatomies into distorted masses of abstract shape. Sibylle Ruppert died in 2011, withdrawn from any social and public life.
2018, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Edition of 150,
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - In stock -
"Hard" is a limited edition publication by New York artist Judith Bernstein. Published in 2018 by Innen Books in Zürich in an edition of 150 copies only on the occasion of Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, September 21-23, 2018.
Judith Bernstein (b. 1942) is a New York artist best known for her phallic drawings and paintings. Bernstein uses her art as a vehicle for her outspoken feminist and anti-war activism, provocatively drawing psychological links between the two. Her best-known work features her iconic motif of an anthropomorphized screw, which has become the basis for a number of allegories and visual puns. During the beginning of the Feminist Art Movement, Bernstein was a founding member of the all-women's cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in New York. Throughout her life, Bernstein has also been involved in the Guerilla Girls, Art Workers' Coalition, and Fight Censorship Group.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Ed. of 100,
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - In stock -
New York based artist Nate Plotkin's (b. 1986) "Untitled" zine of illustrations published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2023. First Edition of 100 copies.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - In stock -
Kikifruit's "Elf Drawings" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2023. First Edition. 150 copies.
Kiki Fruit french drawer and musician.
2019, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 28 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - In stock -
Toshio Saeki's "Unnen" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2019. First edition.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
2020, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - In stock -
Christopher LG Hill's "Yakvlt Soirée" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2020. First Edition. 150 copies.
Born 1980, Melbourne, Victoria; Christopher LG Hill lives and works in Melbourne. A co-founder of artist-run space Y3K, Hill has participated in, and organised, many exhibitions and music-related events and productions. Hill is editor and publisher of Endless Lonely Planet and co-founder of Bunyip Trax.