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
Hardcover, 160 pages, 23.5 x 27.9 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$74.00 - Out of stock
“Doing is living. That is all that matters.”—Ruth Asawa
Throughout her long and prolific career American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) developed innovative sculptures in wire, a medium she explored through increasingly complex forms using craft-based techniques she learned while traveling in Mexico in 1947. In 1949, after studying at Black Mountain College, Asawa moved to San Francisco and created dozens of wire works, among them an iconic bronze fountain—the first of many public commissions—for the city’s Ghirardelli Square.
Bringing together examples from across Asawa’s full and extraordinary career, this expansive volume serves as an unprecedented reorientation of her sculptures within the historical context of 20th-century art. In particular, it includes careful consideration of Asawa’s advocacy for arts education in public schools, while simultaneously focusing on her vital—and long under-recognized—contributions to the field of sculpture. Insightful essays explore the intersection of formal experimentation and identity to offer a fresh assessment of this celebrated artist. Richly illustrated with exquisite new installation views, Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work introduces original scholarship that traces the dynamic evolution of form in the artist’s work.
Edited by Tamara H. Schenkenberg; With essays by Aruna D’Souza, Helen Molesworth, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg
Tamara H. Schenkenberg is curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis.
2003, Japanese
Softcover, unpaginated, 13 x 8.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Keibunsha / Kyoto
$20.00 - Out of stock
"Flip so gently!"
Lovely limited edition flip-book by Japanese illustrator Aquirax Uno, published in 2003 on the occasion of his exhibition "Chic Pop — Aquirax Uno's World Exhibition" at Keibunsha Store Gallery in Kyoto. Long out-of-print, this pocket-sized treasure features monochrome b/w fantastical illustrations of Uno's throughout from the 1950s—1980s and small whimsical texts (in Japanese), each page overlay printed with pink flip-book sequential pencil drawings that metamorphose a cat → girl → fish when flipped.
Aquirax Uno, also known as Akira Uno (b. 1934) is a Japanese graphic artist, illustrator and painter who was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s. His incredibly unique work is characterized by fantastic visuals, capricious and sensuous line flow, flamboyant (and occasionally grotesque) eroticism, and frequent use of collage and psychedelic bright colours. Uno was prominently involved with the Japanese underground art of the 1960s–1970s, and is particularly notable for his frequent collaborations with Shuji Terayama and his experimental theater Tenjo Sajiki.
Good copy with some cover wear. Very Good internally.
2021, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 112 pages, 22.23 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Hayward Gallery Publishing / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
The abiding presence of spiritualism in art, from af Klint to Susan Hiller.
Bringing together more than 30 international artists from the late 19th century to the present day, Not without My Ghosts surveys work inspired by spiritualism and its rich cultural history.
With original essays by art historian Susan L. Aberth and curators Simon Grant and Lars Bang Larsen, this publication explores the anti-authoritarian political agendas of 19th-century spiritualism and the movement’s close association to the history of feminism, as well as its continued influence on contemporary practitioners. Spanning diverse artistic approaches, Not without My Ghosts offers a unique insight into the ties that bind spirit and mediumistic art across the centuries.
Artists: William Blake, Cameron, Ann Churchill, Ithell Colquhoun, Louise Despont, Casimiro Domingo, Madame Fondrillon, Chiara Fumai, Madge Gill, Susan Hiller, Barbara Honywood, Georgiana Houghton, Anna Mary Howitt, Victor Hugo, Augustin Lesage, Pia Lindman, Ann Lislegaard, André Masson, Grace Pailthorpe, František Jaroslav Pecka, Olivia Plender, Sigmar Polke, Lea Porsager, Austin Osman Spare, Yves Tanguy, Suzanne Treister with The Museum of Blackhole Spacetime Collective
2021, English
Softcover, 204 pages, 23 x 32 cm
Published by
Victorian Spiritualist’s Union (VSU) / Melbourne
$100.00 - In stock -
A Gift from Spirit is the long-awaited first-ever monograph committed to the incredible work of British artist and spiritualist medium Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884). Published by the Victorian Spiritualist’s Union (VSU), this handsomely designed, lavishly illustrated book catalogues all thirty-five Georgiana Houghton watercolour and gouache paintings held at the Victorian Spiritualist’s Union (VSU), the largest collection of Houghton's works in the world. Beautiful reproductions of each work are accompanied by the spirit-assisted work annotations, hand-written by Houghton in copperplate script and affixed to the verso of each painting, and here for the first time deciphered, transcribed and commented on. Accompanying texts on the history of the VSU and Houghton’s paintings in Australia by past VSU president Alan Bennett and current VSU president Lorraine Lee Tet, plus extensive texts by editor Jeff Stewart, reproductions of Georgiana Houghton's texts from her first exhibition in 1871, an illustrated essay on understanding and conserving the artistic work of Georgiana Houghton's now famous abstract spiritualist paintings, list of works and biography.
Highly recommended!
British artist, Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884), developed skills as a medium after attending her first séance in 1859 and achieved her first mediumistic drawings in 1861. For the next decade, under the guidance of a spirit called Lenny followed by master painters and 70 Archangels, she produced over 155 extraordinary watercolour spirit drawings. Most of these have been lost, hopefully awaiting rediscovery. Of the 46 that have survived the majority are in the collections of spiritualist societies. The College of Psychic Studies, formerly known as the London Spiritualist Alliance, have 7 and around 35 have been preserved by the Victorian Spiritualist Union in Melbourne.
Houghton's paintings were produced by an automatic process, occurring under the direction of spirits. This technique would be later revisited by such artists as Austin Osman Spare in 1913, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and, from about 1919, by the surrealists. Houghton's earliest known works depicted extremely stylized flowers and fruits. Following a period of formal experimentation, Houghton developed a completely abstract or non-objective style, at least 40 years before Kandinsky, Malevich, Kupka and Mondrian – all of whom were in some measure inspired by spiritual themes. She exhibited a collection of abstract watercolour drawings to the public at an exhibition at the New British Gallery in Bond Street, London in 1871.
2021, English
Hardcover, 184 pages, 27 x 23 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
How the celebrated Surrealist traversed the many movements of 20th-century art with a thrilling disregard for categories and constraints.
Over the course of her protean career, Meret Oppenheim produced witty, unconventional bodies of work that defy neat categorizations of medium, style and subject matter. “Nobody will give you freedom,” she stated in 1975, “you have to take it.” Her freewheeling, subversively humorous approach modeled a dynamic artistic practice in constant flux, yet held together by the singularity and force of her creative vision.
Published in conjunction with the first ever major transatlantic Meret Oppenheim retrospective, and the first in the United States in over 25 years, this publication surveys work from the radically open Swiss artist’s precocious debut in 1930s Paris, the period during which her notorious fur-lined Object in MoMA’s collection was made, through her post–World War II artistic development, which included engagements with international Pop, Nouveau Réalisme and Conceptual art, and up to her death in 1985. Essays by curators from the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Modern Art critically examine the artist’s wide-ranging, wildly imaginative body of work, and her active role in shaping the narrative of her life and art, providing the context for her creative production pre– and post–World War II.
About the Authors:
Nina Zimmer is the Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern. Natalie Dupêcher is Assistant Curator of Modern Art at The Menil Collection, TX. Anne Umland is The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lee Colón is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
Meret Oppenheim was born in 1913 and lived in Germany and Switzerland during her childhood. At the age of 18, she moved to Paris to study art, and there exhibited alongside members of the Surrealist group. Oppenheim returned to Switzerland in 1937, where she trained as a conservator at the Basel School of Design. Already a storied member of the pre–World War II avant-garde, in the last two prolific decades of her life she was embraced by a younger generation of artists for her conceptual approach to art and progressive views on gender. Oppenheim died in 1985.
2019, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 19.2 x 24.6 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$100.00 - In stock -
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) - stage and film actor, director, writer, and visual artist - was a man of rage and genius. Expelled from the Surrealist movement for his refusal to renounce the theatre, he founded the Theater of Cruelty and wrote The Theater and Its Double, one of the key twentieth-century texts on the topic. Artaud spent nine years at the end of his life in asylums, undergoing electroshock treatments. Released to the care of his friends in 1946, he began to draw again. This book presents drawings and portraits from this late resurgence, in colour reproductions. Accompanying the images are texts by by Artaud's longtime friend and editor Paule Thévenin and the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
“We won't be describing any paintings,” Derrida warns the reader. Derrida struggles with Artaud's peculiar language, punctuating his text with agitated footnotes and asides (asking at one point, “How will they translate this?”). Thévenin offers a more straightforward biographical and historical account. (It was on the walls of her apartment that Derrida first saw Artaud's paintings and drawings.) These two texts were previously published by the MIT Press in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud without the artwork that is their subject. This book brings together art and text for the first time in English.
Paule Thévenin (1918–1993) knew Antonin Artaud well and edited many his complete writings for the French publisher Éditions Gallimard.
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), an enormously influential philosopher, theoretician, critic, and deconstructionist, is the author of Of Grammatology, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Aporias, and many other books.
2014, English
Softcover, 115 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$30.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Mary Ceruti, Suzanne Cotter, Christiane Maria Schneider
Although deeply grounded in drawing, J. Parker Valentine’s diverse practice spans film, video, photography, collage, and sculpture. By pushing the limits of mark making, the many possibilities of narrative and image are encountered and explored. The drawn line exceeds its supports and materials, extending beyond the two-dimensional edges of material to something more sculptural. In the same way that Valentine uses erasure to create an image, the negative space or ephemeral material within a space, such as shadow and light, becomes part of the work.
This artist book includes a selection of images—a documentation of exhibited works and those in process—that offer a sense of Valentine’s approach to working, which gestures toward abstraction and improvisation. For this book, many images have been adapted, reoriented, and/or manipulated. Also included are three essays that investigate Valentine’s process, considering work that has emerged from her previous projects, residencies, and exhibitions to date. Mary Ceruti’s essay describes Valentine’s lasso sculptures as oscillating between drawing and sculpture, and discusses the suggestive narratives that play out in sculptural space. Suzanne Cotter touches on Valentine’s interrogation of the integrity of the medium of drawing and its limits, as well as the transformative nature of her work, as eluding any static reading. Describing the development of Valentine’s work in situ, Christiane Maria Schneider considers how each of the works presented are affected by the relationships they enter into, continually moving between the material and immaterial.
Valentine was born in Austin, Texas, in 1980. She was artist in residence at Artpace, San Antonio, in 2013. She has had solo shows at Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2010, 2012); Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf (2012); Taka Ishii, Kyoto (2010); Peep-Hole, Milan (2010); and Lisa Cooley, New York (2008, 2010). She lives and works in New York.
This book is published on the occasion of J. Parker Valentine’s exhibition “Topo” at Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany, February 14–June 29, 2014.
Design by Kloepfer-Ramsey-Kwon
2020, English
Hardcover (clothbound in slipcase), 384 pages, 23 x 30 cm
Published by
The Shed / US
$130.00 - Out of stock
"Agnes Denes, the queen of land art, made one of New York's greatest public art projects ever in 1982. Now, the world might be catching up with her." — Karrie Jacobs, New York Times
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates accompanies the largest exhibition of the artist's work in New York to date, held at The Shed in fall 2019 as part of the arts space's opening season. Presenting more than 130 works, this comprehensive publication, presented in an embossed slipcase, spans the 50-year career of the path-breaking artist dubbed "the queen of land art" by the New York Times, famed for her iconic Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), for which she planted a two-acre wheatfield in Lower Manhattan on the Battery Park Landfill, in the shadow of the then recently erected Twin Towers.
A major undertaking, this superb hardcover catalog includes a comprehensive text by the exhibition's curator, Emma Enderby, an interview with Denes by Hans Ulrich Obrist, essays by prominent scholars and curators including Caroline A. Jones, Lucy R. Lippard and Timothy Morton that examine Denes' multifaceted practice in new ways, writings by the artist and reflections by curators who have worked with Denes over the course of her career. New works by Denes commissioned by The Shed for the exhibition are presented in a special insert.
Budapest-born, New York-based artist Agnes Denes (born 1931) rose to international attention in the 1960s and 1970s as a leading figure in conceptual, environmental and ecological art. A pioneer of several art genres, she has created work in many mediums, utilizing various disciplines--such as science, philosophy, linguistics, ecology and psychology—to analyze, document and ultimately aid humanity.
"Denes's ecological artworks, which she commenced in the late 1960s, are just as prescient as this early diagnosis of climate catastrophe. Over the ensuing decades, she has been called a visionary. But such encomiums risk eliding the depth and complexity they celebrate. Denes has never been just one thing." — Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum
2007, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 23 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Esquire Magazine / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Scarce exhibition catalogue surveying the work of Czech Surrealist artists Jan Švankmajer & Eva Švankmajerová, published to accompany a major retrospective in Japan in 2007, where the artists work is most commonly exhibited. Eva Švankmajerová (1940 – 2005, b. Eva Dvořáková in Kostelec nad Černými lesy), was a renowned painter, ceramicist, and writer active in the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group who's poetry and prose regularly appeared in the journal Analogon. Švankmajerová was married to the Surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer (b. Prague, 1934) and collaborated on many of his award-winning animated masterpieces, including Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) and Otesánek (2000). Lavishly illustrated throughout, this catalogue includes Jan and Eva Švankmajer's independent and collaborative works, spanning painting, objects, collage, ceramics, poetry, graphics, and their highly acclaimed animated film works. Encompassing the entirety of the large-scale exhibition of over 200 works centered around the world of "Alice". Texts in Japanese by Hiroyuki Watanabe.
As New copy.
1991, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 92 pages, 29 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Feest Comics Verlag / Stuttgart
$140.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful oversized hardcover first German edition of this coffee table collection of artwork by Jean "Moebius" Giraud. Published in 1991 by Feest Comics Verlag in Stuttgart, simultaneously by Les Humanoïdes associés and Marvel, this lavishly illustrated, collectable book presents a wonderful selection of Moebius' work for books and magazines, personal work, sketches and more, with introduction by Moebius (in German) and work list. A lovely collection under the guidance of Moebius himself, with beautiful reproductions.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (1938 – 2012) was a master French artist, cartoonist, and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim under the pseudonym Mœbius, as well as Gir outside the English-speaking world, used for the Blueberry series, one of the first antiheroes in Western comics and his most successful creation in the non-English speaking parts of the world. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others, he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé. As Mœbius, he created a wide range of science-fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style, including the legendary Arzach. In December 1974 he co-founded, Métal Hurlant, a magazine that revolutionized the Franco-Belgian comic world in the process. He collaborated with avant garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky on many books and projects, including an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the widely-acclaimed comic book series The Incal. Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science-fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, and The Abyss.
Fine clean copy preserved in Very Good dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
1979 / 2004, Japanese
Softcover, 76 pages, 29.7 x 29.7 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
Pan-Exotica / Tokyo
$85.00 - Out of stock
Japanese edition of the classic 1979 "Giger's Alien", a visually stunning and wonderfully insightful book for any fan of the art of H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon's Alien film or in the production of science-fiction/horror/special effects in any way. A must.
"Giger's Alien provides a complete record of the months and months of painstaking work that resulted in two hours of terrifying celluloid. Sketches, original paintings, photographs of scenery and the Alien under construction and scenes from the film are linked by Giger's detailed diary of his thoughts and actions at the time".
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket of this title. 2004 edition.
2016, English
Softcover (two-volume set), 260 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunsthalle Wien / Vienna
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print.
Edited by Luca Lo Pinto. Texts by Andrew Ayers, Dafne Boggeri, Luca Lo Pinto, Stephen Piccolo, Lodovico Pignatti Morano, Barbara Radice
Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the founding members of Memphis, the groundbreaking Milanese design and architecture collective. During her time with the group she designed patterns for textiles and carpets as well as objects and furniture. Since 1987, however, her main focus and passion has been painting. The title of this publication describes the main focus of her work: the still life. Her distinct influences are visible here: travels to Africa, the ornamentation of the Wiener Werkstätte, the art of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, and Novecento painting by Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi.
This two-volume publication consists of an artist’s book by Du Pasquier with drawings, photographs, and reproductions of her paintings, and a book with photographs by Delfino Sisto Legnani of works from the past decades. Texts by writers and artists and an interview with Du Pasquier provide an informative and subjective view of her artistic practice.
Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, July 15–November 13, 2016
Design by Tank Boys
As New copy of this out-of-print title but with bumped corner of larger volume.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 230 pages, 18.2 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$35.00 - Out of stock
Original 1997 Japanese graphic novel edition of Seraphic Feather Vol. 4: Dark Angel, from the popular manga series by Hiroyuki Utatane (b. 1966). A buried alien starship on the dark side of the moon is ready to give up its secrets, and those who want to harness its incredible power draw in an ever-tightening circle of deception and death. A mysterious scientist with access to the otherworldly technology and in apparent contact with the aliens themselves and their death-dealing sentinels, who dispatch an armed-to-the-teeth elite U.N. strike team like so many toy soldiers. And Apep himself may have unlocked more than mere secrets - he may have transformed into something more - much more - than human!
From a master of adult and fantasy manga works. Japanese language. As New copy.
2019, English
Hardcover, 245 pages, 19.5 x 25.8 cm
Published by
Dia Art Foundation / New York
Koenig Books / London
$95.00 - Out of stock
This hardcover catalogue forms the most comprehensive book on the work of Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985), a German artist associated with the minimalist movement who predominately worked in sculpture, but also produced paintings and works on paper. This heavily illustrated catalogue traces the evolution of Posenenske’s practice from early experiments with mark making to transitional aluminium wall reliefs to industrially fabricated modular sculptures, which are produced in unlimited series and assembled or arranged by consumers at will.
Posenenske exhibited widely during the brief period (1956–68) that she was active as an artist, alongside peers such as Hanne Darboven, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt. Her work is distinguished by its radically open-ended nature: she used permutation and contingency as playful conceptual devices to oppose compositional hierarchy and invite the public to collaborate by reconfiguring her variable sculptures.
Embracing reductive geometry, repetition, and industrial fabrication, she developed a form of mass-produced Minimalism that addressed the pressing socioeconomic concerns of the 1960s by circumventing the art market and rejecting established formal and cultural hierarchies.
Includes texts by Alexis Lowry, Isabelle Malz, Rita McBride, Jessica Morgan, Charlotte Posenenske, Daniel Spaulding, Catherine Wood.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress at Dia:Beacon, New York (8 March – 9 September 2019), before travelling to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (18 October 2019 – 8 March 2020), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf (4 April – 2 August 2020), and Mudam Luxembourg—Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2 October 2020 – 10 January 2021).
2021, English
Hardcover, 212 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - Out of stock
An enchanting collection of Post-it note drawings done for a child's school lunchbox.
This volume assembles 200 drawings made by Berlin-based Ed Atkins (born 1982), internationally known for his video art. Drawn on Post-it notes during weekday mornings over breakfast and slipped into his daughter's lunchbox before school, these delightful and colorful illustrations are reproduced here in their original formats.
Ranging from the playful to the graphic and even sometimes grotesque, they mirror both the absurdity and mundanity of everyday love. Some contain, simply, the words "I love you" or a quick sketch of a sunset, while others seem to treat the format as a sort of canvas, with vividly surreal scenes filling the Post-it note from corner to corner. A true artist's book, this charming volume acts as a playful testament to, and a tender snapshot of, fatherly love.
2017, English
Hardcover, 152 pages, 19.7 x 25.4 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
A superb facsimile of the only known notebook of legendary artist Anni Albers, this publication offers insight into the methodology of a modern master.
Beginning in 1970, Anni Albers filled her graph-paper notebook regularly until 1980. This rare and previously unpublished document of her working process contains intricate drawings for her large body of graphic work, as well as studies for her late knot drawings. The notebook follows Albers's deliberations and progression as a draftsman in their original form. It reveals the way she went about making complex patterns, exploring them piece by piece, line by line in a visually dramatic and mysteriously beautiful series of geometric arrangements.
An afterword by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, contextualizes the notebook and explores the role studies played in the development of her work.
Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a textile artist, designer, printmaker and educator known for her pioneering graphic wall hangings, weavings and designs. She was born in Berlin, and studied painting under German Impressionist Martin Brandenburg from 1916 to 1919. After attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg for two months in 1920, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1922 and joined the faculty in 1929. At Black Mountain College from 1933 to 1949 she elaborated on the technical innovations she devised at the Bauhaus, developing a specialized curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design. In 1949 Albers became the first designer to have a one-person show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the exhibition Anni Albers: Textiles subsequently traveled to 26 venues throughout the United States and Canada. Her seminal book On Weaving, published in 1965, helped to establish design studies as an area of academic and aesthetic inquiry and solidified her status as the single most influential textile artist of the 20th century.
2021, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 21 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunsthalle Basel / Basel
$70.00 - Out of stock
Joachim Bandau’s early sculptural works from the years 1967–1974 remain as strange and singular today as when he first made them. At once technoid and bodily, minimal and monstrous, often with couplings or hoses that resemble weirdly organic orifices and tentacles, these works address questions of agency, control, technology, and history in a way that is increasingly relevant to the present.
This catalogue has been published on occasion of the exhibition of the same name, 02/03/21 – 06/06/21, Kunsthalle Basel. With beautiful photographic documentation of the exhibition, alongside archival exhibition, work and studio images, a catalogue raisonne of works from this period, alongside texts by Elena Filipovic, Martin Herbert, Renate Wagner, a conversation between Joachim Bandau and fellow German artist Alexandra Bircken, and more. Designed by Petra Hollenbach.
1972, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museum of Contemporary Art / Chicago
$60.00 - Out of stock
Scarce early Lee Bontecou catalogue published on the occasion of the first large survey of her work, held at MCA Chicago March 24 – May 7, 1972. Illustrated throughout with b/w illustrations and essay by Carter Ratcliff.
One of the most widely recognized female artists of the 1960s, Lee Bontecou creates welded wall reliefs, hanging sculptures, and miniature, mystical drawings that reflect her interest in natural and man-made forms. Brown and black in tone and often with ominous, organic voids at their centers, her large-scale patchwork accumulations of canvas, leather, wire mesh, and muslin recall nests, machines, ancient architecture, and the human body. She constructs her massive, free-hanging forms from constellations of steel, shaped canvas, porcelain curios, and explosive lengths of wire that reach far into space. Through such works, Bontecou has sought to capture “as much of life as possible—no barriers—no boundaries—all freedom in every sense,” she says.
Very Good copy.
2013, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 24.1 x 27.9 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$130.00 - Out of stock
In 1964, Eva Hesse and her husband Tom Doyle were invited by the industrialist Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt to a residency in Kettwig an der Ruhr, Germany. ‘Eva Hesse. 1965’ brings together key drawings, paintings and reliefs from this short, yet pivotal, period where the artist was able to rethink her approach to colour, materials and her two-dimensional practice and begin preparing herself for the momentous strides she would take upon her return to New York.
Edited by Barry Rosen. Texts by Todd Alden, Jo Applin, Susan Fisher Sterling, Kirsten Swenson
2016, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 91 pages, 20 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Karma / New York
$190.00 - Out of stock
“Lee Lozano’s brief art career in New York, from 1961 to 1971, sometimes seems like a relay race: She moved deftly from gestural and hard-edge figuration to abstraction to task-based Conceptual pieces. By 1972, she had dropped out of the art world entirely. She then moved to Dallas and continued her 1971 conceptual work, in which she decided to ‘boycott women,’—i.e., not interact with them—for the rest of her life. Given her dizzying speed, it can be valuable to focus on a single year of her production. That’s just what LOZANO C. 1962 does, spotlighting thirty-one paintings, some as small as 31⁄4 × 23⁄4”. This handsome ninety-six-page clothbound book accompanied an electrifying exhibition last year at the Manhattan bookshop and gallery space Karma, where the brushy comic-tragic canvases, many depicting faces, penises, and airplanes, lined the walls. In the early ’60s Lozano was merging Surrealism with AbEx and art brut (she had moved to New York after attending the Art Institute of Chicago, which birthed the funny-freaky Monster Roster and Hairy Who). A recurring motif in these works are dick-like Pinocchio noses (‘man as pathological liar?’ asks Bob Nickas in his essay). In one piece, the long penis-nose of a grinning mask cleaves the mouth of another mask. It’s a subtle reminder that Lozano’s wry humor always had a razor-sharp edge. And this shrewdness was one way of surviving times as crazy as our own. As a page from one of her private notebooks here explains: ‘key to how to cope with the nixon danger: either kill it, which my intelligence absolutely refuses, or make a fool of it.’”—LAUREN O’NEILL-BUTLER, Bookforum, APR/MAY 2017
This lovely, quickly out-of-print hardcover volume collects these works together for the first time, alongside texts by Helen Molesworth and Bob Nickas.
Out-of-print. As New copy.
2014, English
Softcover, 12 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Neon Parc / Melbourne
$10.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published to accompany the exhibition Damiano Bertoli — Associates, at Neon Park, Melbourne, 06 May–06 June, 2014. Illustrated throughout with exhibited works on paper in full-colour, with text by Nik Papas and Matthew Benjamin. Extending his interest in the radical sentiments of the 1960s and ’70s, Melbourne-artist Bertoli here engages with the Memphis Group, a radical design studio operating in Milan from 1981–88, coupling their iconic "anti-design" patterns and typographic forms (here labor-intensively rendered in pencil on A0 paper) with the declarative strategies of the Italian leftist Autonomia movement of the 1970s.
2009, English
Softcover (hand-painted/drawn), 96 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Ed. of 1000 (each unique),
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery / Tokyo
$100.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Hand-painted artist book by Josh Smith. "Designed in New York by Josh Smith, Todd Amicon and 38th Street Publishers for Hiromi Yoshii Gallery." Printed in Japan in an edition of 1000 copies. Smith has treated each book's glossy, white covers as a blank canvas, painting and illustrating each on the front and back, making them unique editions. Content is entirely made up of a rich selection of cropped black and white reproductions of Smith's paintings, drawings, stamps, collages, xeroxes, scans of his signature fish, leaves, faces, name (JOSH SMITH), etc. Published to accompany the exhibition "Paintings", Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2009.
Almost as new copy, light tanning to cover edge, otherwise tight and clean throughout. Paint and marker on covers. Some shelf scratching to marker line work.
2021, English
Hardcover, 382 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - Out of stock
Hilma af Klint’s Catalogue Raisonné, the sixth of seven volumes, about one of Sweden’s most fascinating collections of artistic output.
Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint’s works, some 1,600 in all, have been collected in a Catalogue Raisonné. Af Klint’s work should be seen and appreciated in the series of paintings often depicting specific themes and this ground-breaking publication, divided into seven volumes, allows for this. Volume VI focuses on the time after her mother’s death in 1920 when Hilma af Klint gave up her geometrical works and began to paint with watercolours, as in the series On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees, from 1922.
Produced with the permission of the Hilma af Klint Foundation and featuring introductions by Daniel Birnbaum and Kurt Almqvist, a separate slip cased edition containing all seven volumes will be available in autumn 2021.
1992, French / Japanese
Softcover (french-folds w. parchment dust-jacket and obi-strip),
Ed. of 950, first hand-numbered ed. 19/50,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taito Vision / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
Stunning, very rare Japanese publication collecting the works of married Surrealist artist-couple Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer, issued in a limited edition of 950 copies by Taito Vision in 1992. This copy scarcer still, being one of the first edition of 50 hand-numbered copies (no.19/50). Contents include colour reproductions of Unica Zürn's print series "Oracles et Spectacles", published in 1967 after a series of drawings created by Zürn during a 1960 hospitalization caused by a clinically diagnosed psychotic episode. They are accompanied here by a selection of her anagrammatic poetry and a hommage to Zürn by husband Bellmer. These are followed by colour reproductions of Hans Bellmer's "Petit Traité de Morale" print series from 1966-68. Accompanied by biographies, a series of texts in Japanese, a full catalogue and portraits of the artists. A stunning book making these wonderful print editions by two important Surrealists available together in book-form.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket protected in publisher's removable parchment jacket and publisher's obi-strip (both not pictured here, both with some tanning and wear). A most complete and limited copy.