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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
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.
2019, English
Softcover, 378 pages, 22 x 28 cm
Published by
Portikus / Frankfurt
Koenig Books / London
Kunsthalle Basel / Basel
Witte de With / Rotterdam
KIOSK / Ghent
$74.00 - Out of stock
Multi-layered, interwoven, constructed, worn down, humorous, sometimes irritating and unsettling, sleek, and often massive. These are only a few of the possible ways of capturing the work of Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel in words, after their twenty years together as an artistic duo.
This comprehensive and lavishly illustrated monograph looks back, and at the same time takes stock of what is situated in the present. It is a chronological inventory of the oeuvre and thus reveals its development, showing how the work has changed over two decades.
The idea for this book first arose in a conversation with the artists when preparing an exhibition at Portikus in 2017. It was made possible through a collaboration with several additional art institutions, where the artists had solo exhibitions in 2016, 2017, and 2019 respectively.
“Working with ceramics, wood and wool, the artists employ traditional decorative arts and crafts techniques to devise a series of sculptures that, despite their manual means of production, are entirely innovative.” — Julian Elias Bronner, Frieze magazine
Includes texts by Michael Van den Abeele, Liene Aerts, Michael Capio, Dorothée Dupuis, Elena Filipovic, Zoë Gray, Anne Langlois, Charlotte Laubard, Alice Motard, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Samuel Saelemakers, Fabian Schöneich, Véronique Wiesinger
2019, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 17cm x 28 cm
Ed. of 700,
Published by
Centre Centre / London
$59.00 - Out of stock
Out of print.
'Brick Index' is a collection of named bricks and the unseen makers' marks stamped by brickworks from across the UK. It celebrates the humble brick, relishing the textures, colours and graphics debossed into their 'frogs'. This collection serves to rethink a ubiquitous material and honour the graphic stamps hidden all around us. The book features 155 beautifully photographed bricks, printed at actual size, accompanied by an index that states the time, place, and maker of each brick.
Featuring an introduction from David Kitching, a brick historian and an essay from Professor Rick Poynor. Photography by Inge Clemente.
Limited to 700 copies
2008, Japanese
Hardcover (w. obi strip), 267 pages, 23.4 x 30.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Hokkaido Shinbun-Sha / Sapporo
$90.00 - In stock -
Beautiful hardcover monographic catalogue on Japanese-French artist Léonard Foujita, considered "the most important Japanese artist working in the West during the 20th century", published 40 years after his death, on the occasion of the major travelling exhibition "Léonard Foujita" that toured across Sapporo, Utsunomiya, Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Sendai, 2008-2009.
First edition and now out-of-print, this comprehensive and heavily illustrated book covers Foujita's entire life and artistic career, through his years spent in France, Latin America and Japan, illustrating his many drawings, paintings, prints, ceramics, doll houses, furnishings, objects, and other works in great detail and across fold-out spreads illustrating his largest masterpieces, alongside chronology, biography, portraits of the artist and models, his home in France, atelier, materials, tools, cats, nudes, essays in Japanese and French by Tsutomu Shiba, Anne Le Diberder and others. A wonderfully in-depth book and expertly printed in Japan.
Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886 – 1968) was a Japanese–French painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan, who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings. His Book of Cats, published in New York by Covici Friede, 1930, with 20 etched plate drawings by Foujita, is one of the top 500 (in price) rare books ever sold, and is ranked by rare book dealers as "the most popular and desirable book on cats ever published". He spent much of his life in France, where he met Amedeo Modigliani, Pascin, Chaim Soutine, and Fernand Léger and became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Foujita had his first studio at no. 5 rue Delambre in Montparnasse where he became the envy of everyone when he eventually made enough money to install a bathtub with hot running water. Many models came over to Foujita's place to enjoy this luxury, among them Man Ray's lover, Kiki, who boldly posed for Foujita in the nude in the outdoor courtyard. Within a few years, particularly after his 1918 exposition, he achieved great fame as a painter of beautiful women and cats in a very original technique. He is one of the few Montparnasse artists who made a great deal of money in his early years. By 1925, Tsuguharu Foujita had received the Belgian Order of Leopold and the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor. Throughout the 1930s-40s Foujita traveled and painted all over Latin America and returned to Japan, giving hugely successful exhibitions along the way, before returning to France to become a French citizen. His last major work, at the age of 80, was the design, building and decoration of the Foujita Chapel in the gardens of the Mumm champagne house in Reims, France, which he completed in 1966, not long before his death.
Fine copy with original printers obi-strip.
1990, English / German
Softcover (w. inserts), 244 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Serpentine Gallery / London
Kunsthalle Zürich / Zürich
Wurttembergischer Kunstverein / Stuttgart
$90.00 - In stock -
First edition of this exquisite artist's guide-book and compendium by American conceptual artist Barbara Bloom, illuminating the many details of the widely traveled installation "The Reign of Narcissism" (1988-1989), a personal museum devoted to her own likeness presented as a full-scale faux-neoclassical period room.
"This book guides us through the "set" of a 19th century museum room where all aspects of what we see are covered with traces of the artists likeness. (Self) portraits which take the form of Greek style sculptures and bas-reliefs, vanity mirrors, watermark porcelain tea cups, chocolates, cameos, a tombstone, a published series of books entitled "The Complete Works of Barbara Bloom (1989)," commemorative stamps (a perforated sheet of twelve stamps bearing a photograph taken by artist Christopher Williams, of Temple Hospital in Los Angeles, where the artist was born, along with BBs birth date, signature and fingerprint), even period chairs upholstered with a cloth pattern of the artists dental X-rays. The texts delve us into the worlds of Hegel on The Greek Profile, Virginia Woolfs The Lady in the Looking Glass, Ovids myths of Echo and Narcissus, Bruce Chatwins Utz, and Wildes Picture of Dorian Gray. A parody of the monomania that can consume collectors, this work is, for the artist, "less related to Freudian narcissBooism than it is to the narcissistic aspects of art-making and collecting."
Texts in English and German.
This copy complete with all inserted ephemera and editions (stamp sheet, water-marked paper, envelope, etc.). In embossed blue cover.
Barbara Bloom lives and works in New York City. She is a conceptual artist best known for her multi-media installation works. Bloom is loosely affiliated with a group of artists referred to as The Pictures Generation. For nearly twenty years she lived in Europe, first in Amsterdam then Berlin.
Very Good copy, with common light edgewear to covers and creasing to spine.
2019, English
Hardcover, 138 pages, 18.5 x 26.3 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Kunsthalle Wien / Vienna
$62.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Juliane Bischoff
Texts by Christina Barton, Juliane Bischoff, Chris Kraus, Nicolaus Schafhausen
Kate Newby’s works celebrate the moments in which they are created and presented; at the same time, they are open to change. Drawn from impressions collected when navigating cities and landscapes, her sculptures and interventions foreground process: traces of their making are visible, they transform over time, and active engagement is required to view their details. Her works focus on the fleeting and contingent nature of the quotidian and stay connected to the place and time of their presentation. Newby develops her work in response to a specific environment, and often intends that it only exists for a set period of time. Her installations deal with the relationship between inside and outside, and can undermine the line between the work and its surroundings.
The publication I can’t nail the days down documents Newby’s eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien and includes a photo essay by the artist as well as detailing previous projects. Working with the architecture of Kunsthalle Wien’s glass pavilion at the Karlsplatz in Vienna, Newby’s exhibition ranged beyond the physical boundaries assigned to it, and subtly challenged where and how sculpture happens. Christina Barton, Juliane Bischoff, Chris Kraus, and Nicolaus Schafhausen contribute texts to the book that explore the influences, tools, ethical aspects, and poetics of Newby’s artworks, as well as the personal relationships the artist folds into her projects.
Copublished by Sternberg Press with Kunsthalle Wien
Design by Marie Artaker
2017, English / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 28 x 24 cm
Published by
The Design Museum / Munich
$95.00 - Out of stock
With around 190 works by the German ceramicist Beate Kuhn (1927-2015) from over five decades and all periods of creativity, the Freiberger Collection provides an outstanding review of the impressive oeuvre of this internationally renowned artist. Featuring many previously unseen ceramics in new photographs taken for this publication - Beate Kuhn's works are owned by leading museums worldwide and presented here in the most comprehensive publication ever on the artist.
With her unmistakable signature and exuberant imagination, Beate Kuhn (1927-2015) is one of the most significant German ceramicists of the post-war era. She turned to the liberal arts as early as the end of the 1950s. In linking sculptural reasoning with the possibilities of the material and inherent pottery techniques, the internationally renowned artist conquered the frontiers of ceramics and created virtuosic works that went on to form their own contribution to the history of modern sculpture. With around 190 works from all her periods of creativity, the Mannheim architect Klaus Freiberger was able to compile a collection unmatched anywhere else in the world. In honour of its foundation at the Neue Sammlung, the impressive oeuvre of Beate Kuhn is now being presented for the first time in this comprehensive publication. This book accompanies an exhibition at Die Neue Sammlung - The Design Museum, Munich (DE), 13th July - 19th November 2017.
Text in English and German.
1979, Japanese / English
Softcover, 96 pages, 32.5 × 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used,
Published by
Interior Publishing Co. Ltd. / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
JAPAN INTERIOR DESIGN
No.248, November 1979
One of Japan’s finest magazines for interior design and home furnishings, edited by Moriyama Kazuhiko.
JAPAN INTERIOR DESIGN presents a monthly comprehensive view of traditional, contemporary, and contemplated environmental designs and pure art forms both Japanese and foreign, through pictures and critical reviews. English captions and summaries of major articles are provided.
Very rare, this issue includes a huge feature on the Architectural Projects of Italian designer GAETANO PESCE, including "Project for the Pahlavi National Library Competition, 1977"; "House Studio for a Trade-Unionist, 1978"; "Hommage to Italy of the Years 1970, 1978"; "Project for a Skyscraper in Manhattan, 1978" plus essays by Martin Dodman, Ryoji Suzuki, Gaetano Pesce.
Also includes "Glass Surface" by Shoei Yoh essay: Takenobu Igarashi; Shop Interior Designed by Kanji Ueki; Coffee Shop "AZALEA" design: Super Potato; Restaurant Terrace "JOY FULL" design: office HS, Hidenori Seguchi; Series - Product Design of the Month Kitchenware "COOK-PAL" design: Michio Hanyu, Monopro; Ikebukuro Shopping Park—Street with Optical Design Clock design: Jun Kusakari, Hideo Mori essay: Shinya Izumi; New Wallpaper from Fujie Textile design: Hiroshi Awatsuji, Hideo Mori; Series-Reconsideration of Modern Japanese Design — 6 essay: Hiroaki Arima, Takahiko Kaneko, and much more.
2019, English
Softcover, 472 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
RMIT Design Hub Gallery / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
An unreliable guidebook to jewellery accompanies the retrospective exhibition Lisa Walker: She wants to go to her bedroom but she can’t be bothered at RMIT Design Hub Gallery, 29 January – 4 May 2019. This volume considers how the work of New Zealand jeweller Lisa Walker can be thought of as a career-length conversation with the question ‘What is jewellery?’ In doing so it foregrounds the act of asking questions and the pleasure and importance of the ‘as yet understood’. The narratives that emerge within this book offer an open ended reflection on Lisa’s work, moving across different time periods, going off on tangents but returning to the many concerns of the field in which Lisa has so firmly embedded herself.
Design by Ziga Testen and Kim Mumm Hansen
1982, Japanese
Softcover, 6 pages, 21 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ina Ceramics Co. / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Incredibly scarce Japanese exhibition catalogue on Australian artist John Davis, published to accompany his 1982 solo exhibit at the gallery of Ina Ceramics. Ina-Art (or sometimes Ina-X) Art News was the catalogue/newsletter series that the gallery produced with each exhibition, presenting a selection of the artist's works and photographic portraits, alongside texts, artist biography, and exhibition history (all in Japanese). Includes a great selection of Davis' sculptural installations, both indoor and outdoor from the mid-late 1970s, plus a portrait of the artist in Japan.
John Davis (16 September 1936 – 17 October 1999) was an Australian sculptor and pioneer of Environmental art. An Australian exponent of Arte povera, he famously developed a new mode of Site-specific art at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in the early 1970s. John Davis established a critically acclaimed reputation as an influential sculptor and installation artist whose practice synthesised material diversity with an idiosyncratic concept of landscape and ecology. Davis travelled widely and exhibited regularly in America, Japan and Australia. As well as participating in the inaugural Mildura Sculpture Triennial, and he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1978. Davis initially worked in wood and later in fibreglass and aluminium, becoming known for his multiples and for his distinctive formalist style. By 1973, Davis had become increasingly interested in conceptual, process-based and land art practices, and his mature works reflect his sensitivity to elemental forces, the organic world, and his profound connection to the ecological fragility and beauty of landscape.
1986, Japanese
Softcover, 6 pages, 21 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ina Ceramics Co. / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Incredibly scarce Japanese exhibition catalogue on Australian artist John Davis, published to accompany his 1986 solo exhibit at the gallery of Ina Ceramics. Ina-Art (or sometimes Ina-X) Art News was the catalogue/newsletter series that the gallery produced with each exhibition, presenting a selection of the artist's works and photographic portraits, alongside texts, artist biography, and exhibition history (all in Japanese). Cover depicts Davis' great Walden State Freeway installation work from 1984, in Los Angeles, alongside a selection of his installations and wall-reliefs from the 1980s.
John Davis (16 September 1936 – 17 October 1999) was an Australian sculptor and pioneer of Environmental art. An Australian exponent of Arte povera, he famously developed a new mode of Site-specific art at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in the early 1970s. John Davis established a critically acclaimed reputation as an influential sculptor and installation artist whose practice synthesised material diversity with an idiosyncratic concept of landscape and ecology. Davis travelled widely and exhibited regularly in America, Japan and Australia. As well as participating in the inaugural Mildura Sculpture Triennial, and he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1978. Davis initially worked in wood and later in fibreglass and aluminium, becoming known for his multiples and for his distinctive formalist style. By 1973, Davis had become increasingly interested in conceptual, process-based and land art practices, and his mature works reflect his sensitivity to elemental forces, the organic world, and his profound connection to the ecological fragility and beauty of landscape.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 122 pages, 31 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Quadrangle Books / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
At the start of the 1970's, at the very beginning of renowned photographer Oberto Gili's professional career (Architectural Digest, Vogue, House & Garden, Town & Country), he moved to Milan to work for L’Esperto, a publishing company...
"... to shoot and produce a book that was to be called 'Crazy, Mad, Outrageous Interiors'. I traveled around the world for a year working on this book. L’Esperto dropped the project, but Norma Skurka, The New York Times interiors editor those days, took over and Quadrangle Books published the book in 1972. It was called 'Underground Interiors'."
First hardcover edition of this cult classic interior design book - the only one of its kind. This lavishly illustrated book features the deluxe photography of eclectic and inspired domestic settings from all over the world c. early 1970s: "Surrealist Interiors", "Environments", "Radical Chic", "Pop Culture", "Space Age Habitations"... An incredible piece of interior design history.
Includes the living spaces of Karl Lagerfeld, Derek Jarman, Zandra Rhodes, Marina Lante della Rovere, Nanda Vigo, Alan Buchsbaum, Julie Christie, to name only a handful.
"Not just another book on interior decoration with look-alike rooms, Underground Interiors is a fantastic mind-expanding experience into contemporary life styles."
Good ex-library copy with good dust jacket. Some stamping, light wear to jacket/page edges.
1969, English / German / French
Hardcover (cloth-bound w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 22 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Studio Vista / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
1968/69 edition of Decorative Art and Modern Interiors, one of the finest book series from Studio Vista (UK), with Ettore Sottsass cover.
Each handsomely designed volume showcases a selection of the finest examples of new architecture, interior design, environmental design, textiles, furniture and product design, including profiles on highlighted architectural projects that are documented through beautiful colour and b&w photography, descriptive texts, and axonometric, plan and section drawings, plus "Trends in Furnishings and in the Decorative Arts", which gives fine examples of new design in furniture, lighting, ceramics, glassware, silverware, textiles, etc.
This 1968/69 includes work by architects, designers, manufacturers : Verner Panton, Gae Aulenti, Robin Day, Ettore Sottsass, Hans J. Wegner, Tage Poulsen, Anna-Maria Osipow, Pravoslav Rada, Enzo Mari, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Eero Aarnio, Maija Isola, Marco Zanuso, Pierre Paulin, Oiva Toikka, Poltronova, Dieter Rams, Arflex, Kartell, Eva Englund, Alexander Girard, Herman Miller, Claudio Salocchi, Richard Neutra, Vladimir Kagan, Henning Koppel, Heinrich Löffelhardt, Tapio Wirkkala, Timo Sarpaneva, Bruno Mathsson, Angelo Mangiarotti, Nanny Still, Danese, Sergio Asti, Carlo Bartoli, Cini Boeri, Bengt Edenfalk, Tsutomu Imazaki, Svend Siune, Karl Gustav Hansen, Inger Persson, Georg Jensen, Marimekko, Uno and Östen Kristiansson, Kaija Aarikka, Vera Isler-Leiner, Jacques Guillon, Horst Bruning, Yusuke Aida, Ico & Luisa Parisi, Ian Sprague, Mark Hampton, Esko Pajamies, Takeshi Hirobe, Don Gazzard, Peter Karpf, Vitsœ, and so many more, plus an introduction by editor Ella Moody. Translated from English to additional German and French.
An invaluable series of books on architecture, interior and product design from the 1960s-1980s.
Fine copy throughout. Well-preserved dust jacket under plastic wrap.
1968, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 370 pages, 22 x 22 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Württembergischer Kunstverein / Stuttgart
$120.00 - Out of stock
The amazing Bauhaus book, published in 1968 and designed and typeset to abolish all Upper Case letters by Herbert Bayer (one of the most influential members of the Bauhaus) for the first major Bauhaus survey exhibition after the Second World War, curated by Prof. Ludwig Grote, dr. Dieter Honisch, Herbert Bayer and Hans Maria Wingler, at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.
This is the hard cover edition of what is without a doubt one of the most comprehensive and characteristic Bauhaus reference books ever published.
370 pages (with multiple paper stocks) contain no less than 650 colour and black and white illustrations selected from the Bauhaus Archiv, documenting the output of the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin. This heavy, exhaustive volume is split into the following sections : preliminary course and teaching (includes Iteen, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Schlemmer, Hirschfield-Mack, Klee and Schmidt); workshops (includes Teaching on Architecture, Sculpture, Stage, Stained Glass, Photography, Metal, Carpentry, Pottery, Typography, Mural Painting and Weaving); architecture and design (includes Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Mies van der Rohe, Hilberseimer, Brenner, Heiberg, A. Mayer, Stam Wittwer, Arndt, Bayer and Breuer); painting, sculpture, graphics (includes Josef Albers, Arndt, Bayer, Feininger, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Marcks, Moholy-Nagy, Muche, Schlemmer, Wols, etc.); life at the bauhaus; continuation of the teaching; biographies; bibliographies; index.
Includes introductory essays by Ludwig Grote, Walter Gropius, Heinz Winfried Sabais, Otto Stelzer, Hans Eckstein, Nikolaus Pevsner, Jurgen Joedicke, Will Grohmann and Hans M. Wingler.
Artists included: Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Gunta Stolzl, Joost Schmidt, Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Peterhans, Georg Muche, Lilly Reich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hannes Meyer, Gerhard Marcks, Johannes Itten, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Max Bill, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Alfred Arndt, Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Herbert Bayer, Paul Klee, Josef Hartwig, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Christian Dell, Otto Lindig, Theodor Bogler, Wols, and so many others.
Includes references to all aspects of the Bauhaus, including: Itten's Preliminary Course, Klee's Course, Kandinsky's Course, Color Experiments, Carpentry Workshop, Stained Glass Workshop, Pottery Workshop, Metal Workshop, Weaving Workshop, Stage Workshop, Wall Painting Workshop, Display Design, Architecture, Typography and Layout; the Bauhaus Press, the Weimar Exhibition, 1923, Moholy-Nagy's Preliminary Course, Albers' Preliminary Course, Bauhaus Building, The Masters' Houses, Other Buildings in Dessau, Architecture Department, Weaving Workshop, Typography Workshop: Printing, layout, posters, Photography, Exhibition Technique, Wall Painting Workshop: Wall paper, Sculpture Workshop, Stage Workshop, Extracurricular Activities, Spread of the Bauhaus Idea, Bauhaus Teaching in the United States and much more.
All texts in German.
Of all the artists to pass through the Bauhaus, none lived the Bauhaus ideal of total integration of the arts into life like Herbert Bayer (1900 - 1985). He was a graphic designer, typographer, photographer, painter, environmental designer, sculptor and exhibition designer. Between 1925 and 1928, Bayer was head of the printing workshop at the Bauhaus and produced many designs that became standards of a Bauhaus "style." Bayer was instrumental in moving the Bauhaus to purely sans serif usage in all its work, and is especially known is his lowercase, which continues in this 1968 catalogue.
Hardcover 2nd edition w. illustrated dust jacket (protected under plastic wrap) - good copy throughout, with the common bind-splitting at some intervals due to old glue and paper weight (seems to have been previously repaired). All pages still bound and present. Heavy spotting to outer top block edge, tanning to pages edges, otherwise bright and very clean throughout. Good jacket, only light wear.
1969, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Macmillan / New York
$180.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of one of David Hicks' scarcest books, published in 1969 by Macmillan, New York. The second volume in David Hicks' classic series of design volumes, with the iconic stripy dust jacket.
Blurb from the dust jacket:
'Following upon the phenomenal international success of David Hicks on Decoration, this new volume by one of the world's top designers is a most exciting sequel. He demonstrates here, visually, and in words, how people of all incomes can achieve the warmth and interest provided by taste and functional detail. This lavish and elegant volume pin-points all aspects of Living with Taste and covers flower arrangements, tablescapes, wall arrangements, massing, style, lighting and general decoration. It shows how people can live with taste, regardless of their incomes, and selects and expounds on all types of accessories from door handles to lavatories....
"It is amazing how few people bother to cultivate their taste and how very many people there are with no taste - either good or bad, or any feelings about it and all that it affects. Good taste is not expensive; often the more expensive of two alternatives is less acceptable to those who are visually aware—people with taste." - David Hicks
David Hicks is considered to be among the foremost interior designers of the 20th century. From the decoration of his own house in London in 1956—in powerful colours that heralded an end to the drab, postwar English look—he set the pace for interior design both in Europe and America, personifying the many dramatic shifts in home decor throughout the 1960s-1980s, and achieving dynamic balance between the traditional and the contemporary. His design primer book series has become an iconic staple in any interior design library.
Very Good copy with Good Jacket (tiny, repaired tear to front), preserved under plastic wrap.
1968, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 220 pages, 24.5 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schuler Verlagsgesellschaft / Stuttgart
$55.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition from 1968 of this wonderful German interior design volume, beautifully designed and dedicated to inspired design of intimate domestic living/working spaces, such as studio apartments and attics! Presented in lush full-colour photography across 220 pages, with floor-plan drawings and many fold-out photographic spreads, Olga Stier presents an abundance of decorating examples that perfectly capture the imagination and dynamic of mixing the traditional and the modern toward the end of the 1960s. A bountiful, lesser known volume, full of prominent European furniture design, decorative art, textiles, libraries, and antiques.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket, preserved under plastic wrap.
1953, Italian / English
Softcover, 84 pages, 32.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
$40.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Founded in 1928 as a “living diary” by the great Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti, domus has been hailed as the world’s most influential architecture and design journal, distributed in 89 countries. With exuberant style and rigor, it offered energetic up-to-date coverage and analysis of major themes, developments and stylistic movements in product, structure, interior, and industrial design. Called the "Mediterranean Megaphone," domus has always been considered the most concrete published expression of Italian style, documenting generations of radical, practical, and beautiful production, both local and across the world. Amongst a seemingly endless archive of contributions and features, domus frequently covered the works of the protagonists of the Anti and Radical Design movements, modern architecture, new experiments in environmental/spatial/commercial design, international product design, the activities of the Arte Povera, Pop art, Minimal Art and Nouveau Réalisme movements, and much more.
domus No. 288 Novembre 1953
Editor : Gio Ponti
features :
Architecture by Le Corbusier, Ernst Plishke, Egon Eiermann, Gio Ponti, Jean Prouvé, Harry Seidler, Giorgio Host Ivessich, Ettore Sottsass jr., Ico and Luisa Parisi, Mario Burzio, Gianemilio Monti, Piero and Anna Monti; Ceramics by Luigi Gheno, Italian Ceramics; interiors/furniture/object/industrial design by Luisa Parisi, Eero Saarinen, Giacomo Castiglioni, Paul Boissevain, Alberto Rosselli, Kaj Franck; Textiles by Arne Jacobsen; Graphic design of Gordon Andrews; and much more.
Beautifully printed in Italy and heavily illustrated throughout with vivid colour and black and white photography across multiple paper stocks.
Good copy with tanning and edge wear from age, spine flaking. Occasional light moisture wear to some pages and cover.
1954, Italian / English
Softcover, 84 pages, 32.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Editoriale Domus / Milan
$40.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Founded in 1928 as a “living diary” by the great Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti, domus has been hailed as the world’s most influential architecture and design journal, distributed in 89 countries. With exuberant style and rigor, it offered energetic up-to-date coverage and analysis of major themes, developments and stylistic movements in product, structure, interior, and industrial design. Called the "Mediterranean Megaphone," domus has always been considered the most concrete published expression of Italian style, documenting generations of radical, practical, and beautiful production, both local and across the world. Amongst a seemingly endless archive of contributions and features, domus frequently covered the works of the protagonists of the Anti and Radical Design movements, modern architecture, new experiments in environmental/spatial/commercial design, international product design, the activities of the Arte Povera, Pop art, Minimal Art and Nouveau Réalisme movements, and much more.
domus No. 293 aprile 1954
Editor : Gio Ponti
features :
Architecture by Richard Neutra, Ettore Sottsass jr., Georg Maria Lunenborg; Vittorio Gregotti, Lodovico Meneghetti, G.W. van Essen, Vico Magistretti; interiors/furniture/object design by Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Carl Auböck, Vittoriano Viano, Greta Magnusson Grossman, Ignazio Gardella, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Marco Zanuso, Carlo Pagani, Gio Ponti; the theatre design of Pietro Zuffi; Finnish decorative ceramics; tableware by James Prestini; modular Italian furniture; glassware by Timo Sarpaneva; ceramics/flatware by Gio Ponti, Raymond Elston, Conran di Londra; and much more.
Beautifully printed in Italy and heavily illustrated throughout with vivid colour and black and white photography across multiple paper stocks.
1954, Italian / English
Softcover, 84 pages, 32.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Editoriale Domus / Milan
$40.00 - Out of stock
Founded in 1928 as a “living diary” by the great Milanese architect and designer Gio Ponti, domus has been hailed as the world’s most influential architecture and design journal, distributed in 89 countries. With exuberant style and rigor, it offered energetic up-to-date coverage and analysis of major themes, developments and stylistic movements in product, structure, interior, and industrial design. Called the "Mediterranean Megaphone," domus has always been considered the most concrete published expression of Italian style, documenting generations of radical, practical, and beautiful production, both local and across the world. Amongst a seemingly endless archive of contributions and features, domus frequently covered the works of the protagonists of the Anti and Radical Design movements, modern architecture, new experiments in environmental/spatial/commercial design, international product design, the activities of the Arte Povera, Pop art, Minimal Art and Nouveau Réalisme movements, and much more.
domus No. 295 glugno 1954
Editor : Gio Ponti
features :
Gio Ponti architectural report on Vanezuela and the capital of Caracas, including the work of Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Luis Barragán, Oscar Niemeyer, Rino Levi, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, etc.; exhibition of Georges Rouault designed by Ignazio Gardella; the work of Salvatore Fiume, Gino Meloni, Leonardo Cremonini, Pietro; the house of Charles Forberg and Ati Gropius Forberg; the kites of Franz de Geetre; interiors and space design by Leonardo Fiori, Luisa Castiglioni, Angelo Mangiarotti; a rug by Gio Ponti; furniture/design by Yngve Ekström, Franco Albini, Carlo Santi, Gio Ponti, Paolo De Poli, Piero and Anna Monti, Vico Magistretti, Giancarlo Pozzi, Gianfranco Frattini, Ado Franchini; and much more.
Beautifully printed in Italy and heavily illustrated throughout with vivid colour and black and white photography across multiple paper stocks.
Good copy with tanning and edge wear from age, spine flaking. Occasional light moisture wear to some pages.
1990, English / German / Italian
Softcover, 88 pages, 24 x 29 cm
Signed copy,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ikon Galerie / Frankfurt am Main
$850.00 - In stock -
Ettore Sottsass signed copy of this incredibly scarce publication from 1990. "Ettore Sottsass : Drawings over 4 decades / Zeichnungen aus 4 Jahrzehnten" was published by Ikon Galerie fur Design-Zeichnungen (Frankfurt am Main), reproducing sketches for furniture, glass, ceramic, jewellery, lighting, interior and architectural projects by influential Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (1917 – 2007), which are interspersed throughout the text design of this catalogue, which includes a lively interview by Rainer Krause with the artist (a founder of the highly influential Memphis group and Sottsass Associati, as well as designer with Alchimia, Alessi, Olivetti, Arredoluce, Poltronova, Fiorucci, Esprit, Knoll, and many others), text by fellow collaborator and architect/designer/artist Andrea Branzi, and Sottsass's lengthy informal essay presenting his personal view of the sociological significance of the chair.
All texts are in both English and German, with interview also in Italian.
This special copy has been signed by the designer with a large "Sottsass" across the title page in black pen. Not a personalised dedication. A super collectable copy of this already very rare and special book on one of the world's most influential designers and visionaries. Who rarely signed a book!
Very Good copy.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
"Tanya Harrod is our leading scholarly voice on craft. [This] invaluable anthology...is an ideal introduction to the intellectual landscape of craft, and an essential tool for those already invested in the topic." - Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art
Craft is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through ‘craft’, materials, techniques and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labour and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers, and drawing on poetry, fiction, anthropology and sociology. Reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork and the politics of work all throw light on ‘craft’ as process, product and ideology.
Artists surveyed include Anni Albers, El Anatsui, Aaron Angell, Ruth Asawa, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Annie Cattrell, Edmund de Waal, Harun Farocki, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Sheila Hicks, Ana Lupas, Lu Shengzhong, Enzo Mari, Martin Puryear, Jessi Reaves, Bridget Riley, Ettore Sottsass, Studio Formafantasma, Peter Voulkos.
Writers include Glenn Adamson, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Joan Key, Ulrich Lehmann, Sarat Maharaj, Karl Marx, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Roberts, Jenni Sorkin.
Tanya Harrod is an independent design historian who lives in London and who writes widely on craft, art and design. She is co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft and is author of The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (1999), The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew (2012) which won the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World (2015).
2015, English / German
Softcover, 216 pages (colour ill.), 31 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - Out of stock
In a career spanning more than 30 years, encompassing such internationally renowned exhibition events as documenta (1997 and 2012) as well as the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1999), and which has led the way to the world’s major museums, the artist has succeeded in creating new work complexes, objects and images that are continually surprising.
There had already been a great furor in the 1980s surrounding the reception of her wool works, machine knitted woolen fabrics attached to stretchers and then displayed as pictures. In a second group of works she assembled ordinary hotplates on shiny, white, enameled metal panels.
Objects with gender specific connotations were again re-contextualized, as had already occurred in the knitted pictures. These abstract works mainly originate from the 1990s and were the ones that secured Trockel’s place in the history of 20th century art.
This catalogue contains contributions by Johanna Burton, Yilmaz Dziewior, and Beate Söntgen that shed light on Trockel's art historical significance as well as her position in contemporary art. In his contribution, the American artist and author Sam Pulitzer takes an unconventional look at the work of Rosemarie Trockel.
Published for the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 24 January – 6 April 2015.
Due to the weight of this volume, your order will likely incur additional postage costs. We will contact you with the best shipping advice upon your order, or alternatively, please email us in advance. Thank you for understanding.
1975, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 24 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
The Craft Association of Victoria / Victoria
$35.00 - Out of stock
A survey of contemporary Victorian crafts, published on the occasion of a large travelling group exhibition held in 1975-1976 (including the National Gallery of Victoria), organised by The Craft Association of Australia.
Landscape in format, each page of this book profiles a Victorian Craftsperson (almost 100 artists included) working across ceramic, jewellery, tapestry, textile, flatware, furniture, glass, leather, paper and much more. Each featuring an example of their work along with bio information and a profile photo.
Designed by David Sampietro.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 210 pages, 32 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Collins / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
One of the great books on 1960s-70s interior design, Modern Furniture and Decoration, edited by Robert Hartling and published by Collins and Condé Nast in 1971/1972, presents over 200 pages of over-sized, colour-saturated photographs from around the world by the leading interior photographers of the period, bound into one heavy hard-covered volume. One of the must for any design library.
From the dust jacket:
"The contemporary revolution in interior design has a very tolerant philosophy. It accepts with delight unusual combinations of periods, motifs, products, colours, notions. An eighteenth-century commode, an Art Nouveau lampshade, a rare Benin head, a mass-production poster - any one of them is equally likely to be placed in a room alongside a Breuer tubular chair, an Italian lamp, or a Saarinen table."
Features the work of Joe Colombo, Oliver Mourgue, Alvar Aalto, George Nelson, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Ralph Erskine, Robin Day, Verner Panton, Pierre Paulin, Gae Aulenti, Billy Baldwin, Warren Platner, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Karl Largerfeld, Charles Eames, Kartell, Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, Thonet, Georg Jensen, Eero Aarnio, Cy Twombly, Erwin and Estelle Laverne, Mario Bellini, Ristomatti Ratia, Anthony Caro, Jules Olitski, David Smith, Cassina, Mark Rothko, Marimekko, Terence Conran, and many more, spanning living and workspaces.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket, preserved in plastic wrap.
1971, Japanese
Softcover, 152 pages, 29.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Chugai Publishing Co. / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
The Kentiku "Architecture" (A Monthly Journal for Architects and Designers), previously known as Kokusai-Kentiku, was a monthly Japanese architectural magazine founded in 1925, and which had a tremendous influence on architectural theory and design in Japan, covering twentieth century architecture as well as the modern movement. Copies are now very scarce, especially collectable are those issues with cover features dedicated to specific architects, such as this one.
Dedicated to Pierre Chareau and his 'Maison de Verre' (House of Glass)', the bulk of this volume is made up of spreads of copious photographic architectural documentation through the years of this breathtaking Paris residence by Chareau, built between 1928-1932 to house the medical suite and domestic residence of Dr. Jean Dalsace, a member of the French Communist Party who played a significant role in both anti-fascist and cultural affairs. This important collaboration between Chareau (a furniture and interiors designer), Bernard Bijvoet (a Dutch architect working in Paris since 1927) and Louis Dalbet (craftsman metalworker), has been captured in great detail by various photographers - images of the residence interiors, exteriors and room details of living spaces, furnishings, and materials, are accompanied by historical texts (in Japanese) and scarcely seen floor-plans/elevations. Constructed in the early modern style of architecture, the house's design emphasized three primary traits: honesty of materials, variable transparency of forms, and juxtaposition of "industrial" materials and fixtures with a more traditional style of home décor. The primary materials used were steel, glass, and glass block. Some of the notable "industrial" elements included rubberized floor tiles, bare steel beams, perforated metal sheet, heavy industrial light fixtures, and mechanical fixtures, making it a very early influence of what would become known as the "High-Tech" aesthetic. In the mid-1930s, the Maison de Verre's double-height "salle de séjour" was transformed into a salon regularly frequented by Marxist intellectuals like Walter Benjamin as well as by Surrealist poets and artists such as Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Cocteau, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró and Max Jacob.
The generosity of these Kentiku journals make them a treasure for any architecture or interior design enthusiast or collector. This issue also features the buildings and interiors of Japanese architects Kazunari Sakamoto, Hirotaka Sugiura, Kazumasa Yamashita, Kisho Kurokawa, and much more.
French architect and designer Pierre Chareau (1883-1950), a pivotal figure in modernism, known for his innovative concepts and radical use of new materials. Chareau linked architecture, fine arts, and style; designed furniture for avant-garde films and chic homes; formed an important art collection including artists such as Picasso and Mondrian.
Very Good copy with light general ageing and wear to cover, binding, spine.