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
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
1970 / 1975, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 26 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Iwasaki Art Co. / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Lovely 1975 Japanese monograph on the work of Aubrey Beardsley, first published in 1970. Profusely illustrated throughout with 155 works, illustrated biography, biography and list of works, wrapped up in textured stock cover and dust jacket. Texts by Tadayuki Omori.
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872 – 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was leading figure in the aesthetic movement, the British counterpart of Decadence and Symbolism. He produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines such as The Studio, The Yellow Book, and The Savoy. Beardsley was a public as well as private eccentric. He said "I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing." Oscar Wilde said Beardsley had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair." Wilde's irreverent wit and work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, despite his early death from tuberculosis at age 25. His influence is clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster Art Movement of the 1890s, the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists such as Papé and Clarke and 20th fantasy illustration.
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket.
2016, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 12.7 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$35.00 - In stock -
One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry — are hysterically rehearsed.
A Primer for Cadavers, a startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. ‘Part prose-poetry, part theatrical direction, part script-work, part dream-work,’ writes Joe Luna in his afterword, ‘Atkins’ texts present something as fantastic and commonplace as the record of a creation, the diary of a writer glued to the screen of their own production, an elegiac, erotic Frankenstein for the twenty-first century.’
‘Discomfited by being a seer as much as an elective mute, Ed Atkins, with his mind on our crotch, careens between plainsong and unrequited romantic muttering. Alert to galactic signals from some unfathomable pre-human history, vexed by a potentially inhuman future, all the while tracking our desperate right now, he do masculinity in different voices – and everything in the vicinity shimmers, ominously.’
— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]
Afterword by Joe Luna
Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Berlin. In recent years, he has presented solo shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others. His writing has appeared in October, Texte zur Kunst, frieze, The White Review, Hi Zero and EROS Journal. A Primer for Cadavers is his first collection.
Joe Luna writes poetry and critical prose out of Brighton, UK. He teaches literature at the University of Sussex.
1954, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 26 x 20 .5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$8.00 - Out of stock
The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria Vol. VIII, No. 1, 1954. Works by J. M. W. Turner, Derwent Lees, Eric Thake, Ian Fairweather... Recent acquisitions and activities at the NGV, Melbourne.
Good with wear, ageing, light marks.
1954, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 26 x 20 .5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$8.00 - Out of stock
The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria Vol. VIII., No. 4, 1954. Works by Alessandro Turchi, Bernard Buffet, Nicolas de Staël, Michel Kikoine, classical roman sculpture.... Recent acquisitions and activities at the NGV, Melbourne.
Good with wear, ageing, light marks.
1955, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 26 x 20 .5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$8.00 - Out of stock
The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria Vol. IX, No. 1, 1955. Works by Peter Foldes, Frank Hinder, Hector Gilliland, Arthur Boyd, G. F. Lewers, Max Beerbohm. Recent acquisitions and activities at the NGV, Melbourne.
Good with wear, ageing, light marks.
1958, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 26 x 20 .5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$8.00 - Out of stock
The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria Vol. XII, No. 1, 1958. Works by Lucas von Leyden, Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones. Recent acquisitions and activities at the NGV, Melbourne.
Good with wear, ageing, light marks.
1958, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 26 x 20 .5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$8.00 - In stock -
The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria Vol. XII, No. 2, 1958. Works by Eric Gill, David Jones, Domenico Campagnola, plus Silverwear. Recent acquisitions and activities at the NGV, Melbourne.
Good with wear, ageing, light marks.
1958, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 26 x 20 .5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$8.00 - Out of stock
The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria Vol. XII, No. 3, 1958. Works by Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Michael Shannon, Frank Hodgkinson, Lawrence Daws, Len Crawford, Russell Drysdale, Robert Dickerson, Justin O'Brien. Recent acquisitions and activities at the NGV, Melbourne. Good with wear, ageing, light marks.
1976, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 26 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunstmuseum Basel / Basel
The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design / Halifax
New York University Press / New York
$220.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of the lovely catalogue raisonné of Donald Judd's drawings, published on the occasion of the solo exhibition held at Kunstmuseum Basel, April 14 - June 23, 1976. Indexes 252 drawings in catalogue raisonné style to complement the sculpture catalogue raisonné from the previous year (1975). Reproduces 143 drawings, along with a wonderful section of photographic documentation of sculptural installations, and individual sculptural works. Text by Dieter Koepplin in German and English, as well a a biography, bibliography, and checklist.
Very Good copy with a few light marks to covers, light tanning.
2013, English / French
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 256 pages, 21 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Black Jack Editions / France
$69.00 - Out of stock
First anthology of Rosemarie Trockel's collages, which are a key for a difracted and non-academic view on the whole work of this German artist known internationaly.
Rosemarie Trockel's collages form an important and central component of the retrospective exhibitions “Flagrant Delight”, held in 2012-2013 at Wiels (Brussels), Culturgest (Lisbon) and Museion (Bolzano), and “Verflüssigung der Mutter” (Deliquescence of the Mother), at the Kunsthalle Zurich in 2010. These collages are the subject of this publication, which takes a more detailed and in-depth look at them through a comprehensive body of illustrations of the 100 or so collages Trockel has produced to date, together with commissioned essays that address specifically this (still relatively unexplored) aspect of her extensive and multifaceted work.
Texts by Brigid Doherty, Gregory Williams, Elvan Zabunyan.
2000, German
Softcover, 140 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
b_books / Berlin
$55.00 - Out of stock
Scarce early artist's book (10 years is not a fat pig) by German painter Michaela Eichwald, featuring writings and artworks by the artist Michaela Eichwald from the period of 1989-1999, with a preface by fellow artist Kai Althoff.
"A book that belongs in every household." FAZ
2021, English
Hardcover, 250 pages, 23 x 29 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited English translation of a pioneering account of af Klint’s oeuvre.
Text by Åke Fant. Translation by Ruth Urbom.
For the first time since its original publication in 1989, Åke Fant’s pioneering account of Hilma af Klint’s life and career is available to read in English. Following her training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and 20 subsequent years of painting, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began working with an abstract visual language in 1906. She then dedicated the rest of her life to her magnum opus, a series of large-scale abstract paintings intended to be exhibited as part of an immense spiritual temple. Af Klint drew upon contemporaneous occult sources to develop her work, such as Spiritualism and the writings of Theosophical writers Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, as well as Rudolf Steiner, who claimed to be clairvoyant. This edition supplements Åke Fant’s original text and curator Lars Nittve’s foreword with a new preface by Kurt Almqvist (President, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit). An updated timeline, full-color reproductions of af Klint’s art and a beautiful cloth binding further emphasize the momentousness of Fant’s work, which remains vital even in the light of subsequent research, at a time when interest in Hilma af Klint and her work has never been greater.
1972, Japanese / French
Softcover, 180 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful and scarcely seen Japanese catalogue on the work of Argentine artist Leonor Fini. Profusely illustrated throughout with Fini's incredible (Surrealist) paintings and drawings from 1936-1972, in colour and black and white. Includes biography and artist's introduction by Fini in French. All other texts are in Japanese.
Leonor Fini (1907–1996), an Argentine painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women, is considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century and also one of the most misunderstood. Fini had no formal artistic training. Born in Buenos Aires, she travelled extensively from a young age, living in Milan and then moving to Paris in 1931-32 where she was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, becoming acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired much of her work, and also Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. She had her first one person show in Paris when she was twenty-five at a gallery directed by Christian Dior. Her work caught on fast and was included in the pivotal and groundbreaking Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the MOMA in 1936 while at the same time she had her first New York exhibition at the avant-garde Julien Levy Galley. Surrealist artists in France came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although she did not consider herself a surrealist, nor a part of any particular artistic movement. Fini preferred to stake her own claim on modernism with a vision that owes more to the farthest shores of her imagination than to any affiliation with art trends, schools or movements. The originality of her art as well as her intelligence, famous wit and charisma accorded her celebrity status in the Paris art world and beyond beginning in the late thirties. Her panache and glamour, once they found a place in the collective imagination of the time, turned her into a much-publicized fashion and feminist icon. Always controversial, with as many detractors as admirers, she lived and painted consummately on her own terms.
In Paris in 1939 she curated the inaugural exhibition of her friend Leo Castelli’s first gallery (of surrealist furniture) and shortly thereafter, just before the German occupation, she traveled with André and a new lover to Arcachon in the southwest of France to begin waiting out the war. She remained there for almost a year with Salvador and Gala Dali before moving to Monte Carlo where she met the young Italian diplomat, Stanislao Lepri who became one of the great and enduring loves of her life. As the war intensified she moved with Stanislao to Rome where she lived, worked and formed close friendships with Anna Magnani, Luchino Visconti and other leading figures of world of art and letters. After the Liberation of Paris in 1946 she returned there to live and work for the remainder of her life, exhibiting extensively around the world.
The predominant themes in Leonor Fini’s art are sexual tensions, mysteries and games. One of her favored subjects is the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male, and in many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx to which she felt a strong identification. She was also a renowned portraitist, and among her subjects were such friends as writers André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Genet, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas), such actresses as Anna Magnani and Suzanne Flon, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, film director Luchino Visconti and artists Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington.
Her genius for stage and screen design is evident in her numerous ground breaking theater decors with their elaborate conception, costumes and phantasmagorical masks. She designed for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palais de Crystal, and choreographer Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, as well as over seventy productions at theaters in Paris between 1946 and 1969. She had a unique talent for film design and created costumes for Fellini's 8 ½ as well as for Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire d'O.
The provocative and much-publicized life of Leonor Fini was pure theater. Her story is that of a hard-won struggle to forge her life as a woman artist in a man’s world and to invent herself on her own terms. It is the story of a woman possessing exceptional independence, a highly original vision and great personal magnetism who lived passionately through her art and friendships and in the process became a feminist role model.
2001, French / Japanese
Hardcover, 174 pages, 25 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokyo Station Gallery / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful hardcover catalogue surveying the engravings of James Ensor, published to accompany a major travelling exhibition in Japan in 2001. Beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated throughout with 175 graphic works reproduced in crisp detail, alongside many other illustrations of Ensor's life and paintings, accompanying texts in French and Japanese, including text by Ensor himself, biography, bibliography, catalogue and portraits of the artist in Ostend. Contains a wealth of fine examples of Ensor's fantastic grotesque engravings in both their black line print form alongside their over-painted colour editions, many with additional related sketches and historical references. Highly recommended.
Very Good copy, perfectly preserved interior with only light wear to illustrated hardcover boards.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favoured increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as The Scandalized Masks (1883) and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colourful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colours, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. James Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wols, and many expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century.
2021, English
Hardback, 252 pages, 22.9 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$80.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawings.
Much of Joseph Elmer Yoakum's story comes from the artist himself-and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891-1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a "spiritual unfoldment"? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities.
With hundreds of beautiful colour reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist's work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography.
2001, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 25 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museum of American Folk Art / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
The first monographic study on Joseph E. Yoakum (1890-1972), an African American-Native American self-taught master. Profusely illustrated, Traveling the Rainbow is a fitting tribute to this fascinating, yet little-known creator of visionary landscapes. What emerges herein fits an adventure novel. Yoakum traveled the oceans on steamliners working in their boiler rooms. He rode America's railways as an inspector. With an elite team of African American troops in World War I, he toured Europe. On the road with the Ringling Brothers Circus he posted circus flyers. He spent a year in a psychiatric hospital. He was 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes, and he produced over 2,000 watercolour and pencil drawings during the last decade of his life, infused with the motion and energy of travel. Much of what he told about his life -- especially about his travels -- was thought to be invented, but here Derrel DePasse makes startling discoveries about the artist's landscapes and finds that much of his story of himself was grounded in fact. Part African American, part Native American, Yoakum drew on his dual background and conjured powerful forms of expression -- the blues and Native American symbolism -- to create dynamic cultural fusions.
This monograph remains the most comprehensive study on this great American artist, including a chronology, bibliography, list of collections, exhibition history, and index.
Very Good copy.
1984, Japanese
Softcover, 224 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Night Vision / Japan
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 edition of cult Japanese underground magazine Night Vision, a special edition dedicated to Surrealism. Packed with content, including many important Surrealist texts translated to Japanese, this heavily illustrated book includes features on Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn, Yves Tanguy, Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Belgian Surrealism, female Surrealist artists and poets (Remedios Varo, Mimi Parent, Valentine Penrose, Gisèle Prassinos, Dorothea Tanning, Bona de Mandiargues, Isabelle Walberg, Lise Deharme, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Aube Elléouët, Jane Graverol, Nelly Kaplan (Belen), Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, Unica Zürn, Valentine Hugo, Marianne Van Hirtum, Leonora Fini, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Kay Sage, Toyen, Annie Le Brun, Meret Oppenheim), Latin American Surrealism and Frida Kahlo-Diego Rivera, Surrealist literature and activities (Artaud, Picabia, Apollinaire, Bataille, Duchamp, Satie, Breton, etc.) plus much more, text contributions by Georges Bataille, Paul Eluard, Midori Wakakuwa, Kuniharu Akiyama, Takashi Tanyuya, Shigeo Goto, Takahiko Okada, Octavio Paz, André Breton, Kunio Iwaya, Gonzalo Cerorio, Yuichi Konno, Satoshi Takamura, and much more. Illustrated in b/w throughout (with many more artists than mentioned above) in that great Night Vision semi-fanzine/cheap reader quality.
Very Good - Fine copy.
2019, English
Softcover, 28 pages, 16.5 x 23.6 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
Kunsthalle Zürich / Zürich
$28.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad's "Exist at All", published by Innen Books and Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, on the occasion of IDA EKBLAD: FRA ÅRE TIL OVN at Kunsthalle Zurich June 08 – August 18, 2019. First Edition.
Ida Ekblad's (b. 1980) artistic practice incorporates painting, sculpture, performance, filmmaking as well as poetry. Her works transmit a distinct vibrancy and spontaneity, created through the energetic movement of her compositions, the bold application of colour and the attentive use of found materials. Ekblad's expressive paintings often depict winding and twisted lines, some indicate human-like figures, others resemble landscapes. The forms and gestures found in her work derive from a wide variety of inspirations and art historical references, such as CoBrA, Situationism and Abstract Expressionism but also pop cultural aesthetics like graffiti or cartoon that indicate Ekblad's genre-crossing approach.
1986, Japanese
Softcover, 76 pages, 29.7 x 29.7 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Japanese 1986 edition of the classic "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 original dust jacket of this title. Only light wear, beautifully preserved.
2003, English / German
Softcover, 94 pages, 21 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
FOE 156 / Munich
$18.00 - In stock -
Artist publication and catalogue documenting Australian artist Stephen Bram's work, Oberföhringer Straβe 156, 2001, published in 2003. Edited with texts by Christopher Kramatschek, as well as Thomas Janzen, and an interview between curator Sue Cramer and Stephen Bram. Profusely illustrated throughout with extensive photo documentation of Oberföhringer Straβe 156, 2001, alongside elevations, and many reference images of Bram's paintings and other works, references. All texts in English and German.
2015, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Sun Vision Press / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
I Am the First Consciousness of Chaos collects the key noirs' (lithographs, etchings and charcoals) of Odilon Redon, perhaps the most enigmatic and esoteric figure in the artistic lineage that leads directly from Symbolism to Surrealism. Never previously available in a single trade volume, the majority of Redon’s noirs (over 250 illustrations) are finally collected here, including the illuminating excerpts from the decadent texts which inspired their creation. Authors featured include J-K Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and others.‘
2013, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 72 pages, 21 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Pace London / London
$140.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce copy of this rare and unprecedented overview of Paul Thek works from the early to mid 1960's, across all the media he worked, and never seen before to this extent in the UK. The exhibition, curated by Kenny Schachter, includes works from the noted newspaper series to the legendary and singular 'Technological Reliquary' series.
An American sculptor, painter, and installation artist, Paul Thek (1933-1988) is primarily known for hyper-realistic works of human body parts executed in fleshlike beeswax and for his strongly symbolic, room-size installations constructed from transitory materials. A major figure on the 1960s New York art scene, Thek also spent time in Europe, where he paved the way for artists adopting collaborative strategies. Although he gained a large following and was featured in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions, the anti-establishment "artist's artist" was practically forgotten at the time of his death from AIDS related illness in New York City in 1988, aged 54.
As New copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 376 pages, 22.9 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
Art Institute of Chicago / Chicago
$99.00 - Out of stock
Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a renowned maker of meticulous collages whose works influenced movements including Pop Art, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. Emerging from the interdisciplinary community of artists and poets at Black Mountain College, Johnson was extraordinarily adept at using social interaction as an artistic endeavor and founded a mail art network known as the New York Correspondence School.
Drawing on the vast collection of Johnson’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago, this oversized, beautifully designed volume gives new shape to our understanding of his artistic practice and features hundreds of pieces that include artist’s books, collages, drawings, mail art, and performance documentation. In keeping with Johnson’s democratic, rhizomatic, and antihierarchical ethos, this indispensable resource on the artist’s oeuvre contains 700 illustrations, many of them never before published, and twenty-one short essays by various contributors that allow readers to dip into and out of the book in a nonlinear manner.
Text by Jordan Carter, Colby Chamberlain, Jennifer R. Cohen, Johanna Gosse, Caitlin Haskell, Miriam Kienle, Brian T. Leahy, Ellen Levy, Solveig Nelson, Thea Liberty Nichols, Michael von Uchtrup
Caitlin Haskell is Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of International Modern Art, and Jordan Carter is associate curator of modern and contemporary art, both at the Art Institute of Chicago.
2021, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 24.5 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Nieves / Zurich
$39.00 - In stock -
The fascination with Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963) has never been greater than it is today. Much that the researcher, healer and artist anticipated with her holistic way of thinking is now taken for granted in contemporary art. ‘My images are intended for the 21st century,’ Emma Kunz is once said to have predicted. The augury of the researcher, naturopath and artist from Brittnau in the Canton of Aargau seems to be coming true: Emma Kunz’s drawings, presented to the public for the first time in the Aargauer Kunsthaus in 1973, have been shown in such places as Venice, Munich, London, Tel Aviv and Hong Kong over the past few years, and are celebrated by an international audience.
Living a secluded life far removed from the art scene, eighty years ago she exemplified an expanded concept of art, rejected the idea of art versus non-art and instead opened it up to a wide range of aspects – research, medicine, nature study and the supernatural, the magical, the visionary.
Emma Kunz (1892 in Brittnau/CH – 1963 in Waldstatt/CH) was born into humble conditions in Brittnau in the Canton of Aargau. She never had any artistic training or higher education of any kind. Emma Kunz is said to have become aware of her special clairvoyant and radiaesthetic [radiation- reading] abilities at an early age. She began to heal her first patients and to work with the divining pendulum that she would use in her drawings from 1938 onwards. Until a few years before her death she produced some 500 characteristic drawings on graph paper, which she used as a tool for her healing activity. She also worked with numerology, researched in the field of herbalism and achieved a legendary series of healing successes. At this time she began to ask her acquaintances to call her ‘Penta’. In 1942 Emma Kunz is said to have discovered Aion A, the healing rock that is still available from Swiss pharmacies, in a quarry in Würenlos that had been used since Roman times – and is known today as the Emma Kunz Grotto.