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.
1987, German
Softcover, 94 pages, 30 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart / Stuttgart
$20.00 - In stock -
Catalogue of German impressionist painter Christian Landenberger, "Paintings, Drawings and Etchings", held at the Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart in 1987. Heavily illustrated throughout in colour and b/w, accompanied by German texts.
Christian Adam Landenberger (1862—1927 in Stuttgart) was an impressionist painter and professor at the Stuttgart Art Academy. Christian Landenberger was primarily known for his impressionistic portraits, landscapes and scenes. As one of the forefathers of German plein air painting, he became an important figure in the evolution of German art. He preferred to paint open-air subjects, but still lifes, interiors, allegorical and religious depictions are also among Landenberger's works. From 1893 to 1915 he worked on the motif of "bathing boys".
Good copy with cover edge wear.
1983, English
Softcover, 26 pages, 31 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Stephen Mazoh Gallery / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Over-sized catalogue published on the occasion of a solo exhibition by American painter Cy Twombly (1928—2011) at Stephen Mazoh Gallery, New York, in 1983. Illustrated in colour throughout with Twombly's exhibited works, accompanied by an essay by Marjorie Welish, biography and catalogue list.
Cy Twombly (1928—2011) was an American painter, draftsman, and sculptor whose work reflects a lifelong consideration of the expressive possibilities of mark making.
Good copy with cover wear/age.
1990, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 31 x 22 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Westermann / Braunschweig
$60.00 - Out of stock
1990 German edition of this 1986 monograph on Antoni Tàpies by Victoria Combalia Dexeus, originally published by Ediciones Poligrafa S. A., Barcelona, this edition by Westermann, Braunschweig.
"This book by Victoria Combalia Dexeus strengthens our intrinsically artistic knowledge of the painter with a text supported by a lucid, well-documented cultural consciousness. The author analyses a good number of specific paintings, the reciprocal relationships and connections of which with other cultural facts or events are established with very sound arguments. Her intelligent exposition is of great assistance to us in our attempts to further our acquaintance with the work of this great Catalan artist - an 'oeuvre' capable of successive interpretations which gradually reveal to us, as in this case, its 'greatness and its profundity." The chapters are: abstract art; childhood, adolescence & the Surrealist period; the international context; a many-faceted realism; imitation through textures; transpoition of textures; objects; ambiguous perspectives, poetic geometriess, empty spaces; bodies; elusive presences; signs. Heavy illustrated throughout.
Antoni Tàpies (1923 – 2012) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis and spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy, especially that of Sartre as well as Eastern thought. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set, alongside poet Joan Brossa, which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. In 1953 he began working in mixed media as a member of the Art Informal school; this is considered his most original contribution to art. Working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into paintings (clay, marble dust, waste paper, string, and rags), he became known as one of Spain's most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. Social themes run throughout his highly textured and tactile paintings, which were influenced by his experience of the politics and environment of the wartime and the postwar state of the Spanish government. His abstract and avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world. “If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination,” he reflected.
1986, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 31 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ediciones Poligrafa S. A. / Barcelona
$65.00 - Out of stock
First English edition of this great monograph on Antoni Tàpies by Victoria Combalia Dexeus and published by Ediciones Poligrafa S. A., Barcelona, in 1986.
"This book by Victoria Combalia Dexeus strengthens our intrinsically artistic knowledge of the painter with a text supported by a lucid, well-documented cultural consciousness. The author analyses a good number of specific paintings, the reciprocal relationships and connections of which with other cultural facts or events are established with very sound arguments. Her intelligent exposition is of great assistance to us in our attempts to further our acquaintance with the work of this great Catalan artist - an 'oeuvre' capable of successive interpretations which gradually reveal to us, as in this case, its 'greatness and its profundity." The chapters are: abstract art; childhood, adolescence & the Surrealist period; the international context; a many-faceted realism; imitation through textures; transpoition of textures; objects; ambiguous perspectives, poetic geometriess, empty spaces; bodies; elusive presences; signs. Heavy illustrated throughout.
Antoni Tàpies (1923 – 2012) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis and spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy, especially that of Sartre as well as Eastern thought. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set, alongside poet Joan Brossa, which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. In 1953 he began working in mixed media as a member of the Art Informal school; this is considered his most original contribution to art. Working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into paintings (clay, marble dust, waste paper, string, and rags), he became known as one of Spain's most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. Social themes run throughout his highly textured and tactile paintings, which were influenced by his experience of the politics and environment of the wartime and the postwar state of the Spanish government. His abstract and avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world. “If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination,” he reflected.
1979, English
Softcover, 278 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition, first softcover printing of this 1978 English-language major monograph on Antoni Tàpies, authored by English artist, historian and poet, Roland Penrose (1900—1984) and published by Rizzoli. Profusely illustrated with 217 images, including 73 in colour, accompanied by Penrose's text, a chronology, checklist, bibliography, list of previous exhibitions, and list of museums and institutions with works by Tàpies.
Antoni Tàpies (1923 – 2012) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis and spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy, especially that of Sartre as well as Eastern thought. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set, alongside poet Joan Brossa, which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. In 1953 he began working in mixed media as a member of the Art Informal school; this is considered his most original contribution to art. Working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into paintings (clay, marble dust, waste paper, string, and rags), he became known as one of Spain's most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. Social themes run throughout his highly textured and tactile paintings, which were influenced by his experience of the politics and environment of the wartime and the postwar state of the Spanish government. His abstract and avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world. “If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination,” he reflected.
Very Good copy, light wear to edges, small marker price cross-out to back cover.
1964, English
Softcover (single bi-fold card), 25 x 15.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Argus Gallery / Melbourne
$140.00 - In stock -
Incredibly rare first catalogue of Italian-Australian artist George Baldessin, published on the occasion of his first solo exhibition held at Argus Gallery in 1964, on the fourth floor of the old Argus newspaper building in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. Bi-fold catalogue lists a brief biography with complete list of 39 exhibited works in sculpture, drawings, etchings/aquatints, and bronzes, featuring Baldessin print cover. The Argus Gallery exhibit "was the rite de passage which marked Baldessin's coming of age in Australian art"—Memory Jockisch Holloway, Baldessin having only just returned to Melbourne in 1963 from studying in Milan under sculptor Marino Marini. An important piece.
George Baldessin (1939–1978) was an Italian-Australian artist, printmaker and sculptor. He studied at RMIT from 1958 to 1961 and later at the Chelsea School of Art in London in 1962. He continued further study at the Brera Academy of Fine Art Milan from 1962 – 63. A charismatic figure in the history of Australian art, especially in Melbourne in the 1970s when Baldessin worked in a studio on Collins St with fellow artists Tate Adams, Les Kossatz, Andrew Sibley, Roger Kemp, Fred Williams and Jan Senbergs. Together with Imants Tillers, Baldessin represented Australia at the XIII São Paulo Art Biennial in 1975. Tillers and Baldessin became close friends between 1975 to 1977 when Baldessin lived in Paris, attending the Lacourière-Frélaut engraving workshop. Baldessin was known for his generosity and encouragement to others' creativity until his accidental death in 1978, at the age of 39. Baldessin's prints and Surrealist influenced distorted figurative sculptural work features in most major private and public collections in Australia, and many overseas. A major joint exhibition featuring Baldessin's works alongside Brett Whiteley's was featured at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2018.
Average—good copy. Foxing, general wear/age.
1979, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 76 pages, 29.7 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$85.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of the 1979 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 VG original dust jacket. Only light wear/age. First edition.
1992, English
Softcover, 94 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$45.00 - Out of stock
"The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking."H.R. Giger
1992 printing of A Rh+, the English edition, collecting Giger's multi-faceted career in one place: From surrealistic dream landscapes, to album cover designs, and sculpture. Lavishly illustrated with over 100 images with detailed captions, this monograph forms a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the most leading fantasy artist and ALIEN master, H.R. Giger, covering his cultural and historical importance and a concise biography.
Very Good copy with light cover wear.
1981, German
2 Vol. in slipcase, 125 and 89 pages, 22 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Neue Galerie — Sammlung Ludwig / Aachen
$70.00 - In stock -
First edition of the 2-volume boxset survey of German artist Joachim Bandau (b. 1936), published by Neue Galerie — Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen in 1981. Housed together in card slipcase, Volume 1 : Zeichnungen 1976-1979 collects Bandau's incredible drawings and collages on paper spanning the late 1970s, Volume 2 : Skulpturen 1978-1980 collects has floor sculptures from the late 1970s. Both profusely illustrated in black and white, landscape format.
Joachim Bandau (b. Cologne, 1936) is a sculptor, painter and graphic artist. He belongs to an important group of German artists, together with Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and Imi Knoebel, who came out of the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in 1961. In 1966, he was among the founders of the group of artists K66. Bandau showed several works at Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, including a performance inside Kabinen-Mobil. For the first time, Joachim Bandau was “using” by himself one of his famous “mobile sculptures“, imposing polyester structures close to man-machine hybrids, which refer to the human condition and form. Bandau created a large series of these mobile sculptures made from fiberglass from the late 1960’s and throughout the 1970s. These futurist-organic figures resemble a hybrid of man, machine, and design-object, contrast a tension between confinement and spatial deployment, with his sculptures’ potential for mobility. Since the 1990s, Joachim Bandau has been painting transparent filters of light-gray watercolour to shape blocks of dark matter, reminiscent of radiographs, but also of Malevitch’s Suprematist compositions. These Black Watercolours suggest incessant motion from within to without, between withdrawal and spatial control. Shades of grey watercolour evoke photographic decomposition of movement, as if each were capturing successive movements of one block of colour. He resides in Switzerland.
Good copy. Bumping to one corner, tanning to edges.
2002, German / English
Softcover, 280 pages, 22.2 x 27.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
$45.00 - In stock -
Published to accompany a 2002 exhibition of Mark Tobey / Morris Graves / John Cage appearing at the Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen, Germany) and the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, Washington), this catalog is profusely illustrated throughout with many of the artists' works as well as interpretive and biographical essays and a chronology. The three artists were friends and collaborators linked by their connections with the Pacific Northwest, their appellation as Northwest Mystics, and, more deeply, by their shared artistic concerns. John Cage composer, philosopher, writer, and visual artist wrote extensively about Tobey and Graves, and his writings are included here as well.
Original German edition with many texts also in English, in particular Cage's.
Near Fine copy.
1975 / 1983, English
Softcover, 135 pages, 20.5 x 20.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
Design and Form is the most complete document of one of the landmarks of modern education in art — the famous Basic Course at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Itten was the teacher who organized it at the invitation of Walter Gropius. First published in 1963 when Itten was still alive, the book has been revised and updated by Itten's widow, Anneliese Itten, and includes new material fro the basic course at the Bauhaus, as well as visual examples and descriptions of the refinements made by Itten in later courses in Berlin (1926—1932), Krefeld (1932—1938), and Zurich (1938—1960)."—publisher
Revised 1975 edition, 1983 printing.
Very Good copy. Small bump to back cover lower corner.
1978, German
Softcover, 20.5 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schellmann & Klüser / Munich
$45.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Jörg Schellmann & Berndt Klüser and published on the occasion of a major travelling exhibition across Germany in 1977-78 (including Stadtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Neue Galerie, etc.) this great, heavily illustrated book documents Beuys' entire multiple output, encompassing his entire career. In conversation with the publishers, Beuys gives his intentions and explains his "extensive concept of art" through 167 illustrated art multiples, followed by a cross-section of his history of unique works - sculptures, actions, drawings, paintings, installations, etc., giving context to this document of editioned pieces.
Texts in German.
Joseph Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue.
His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate and only rarely acrimonious open public debates on a very wide range of subjects including political, environmental, social and long term cultural trends. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.
1970, Japanese
Hardcover (w. illustrated slipcase), 266 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Sonorama / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1970 slipcased hardcover edition of manga master Shigeru Mizuki's absolute classic illustrated encyclopedia of his beloved Yōkai (Japanese supernatural beings and phenomena), published in this gorgeous hardcover edition in illustrated slipcase by Ashahi Sonorama, here for the first time in 1970 and long out-of-print. A must for any lover of the illustrated weird by a master of the genre.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922–2015) was one of Japan’s most respected artists. A creative prodigy, he lost an arm in World War II. After the war, Mizuki became one of the founders of Japan’s latest craze—manga. He invented the yokai genre with GeGeGe no Kitaro, his most famous character, who has been adapted for the screen several times, as anime, live action, and video games. In fact, a new anime series has been made every decade since 1968, capturing the imaginations of generations of Japanese children. A researcher of yokai and a real-life ghost hunter, Mizuki traveled to over sixty countries to engage in fieldwork based on spirit folklore. In his hometown of Sakaiminato, one can find Shigeru Mizuki Road, a street decorated with bronze statues of his Kitaro characters.
VG in VG dj. Beautiful copy.
1985, Japanese
Hardcover, 264 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Sonorama / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
1985 revised edition of manga master Shigeru Mizuki's absolute classic 1970 illustrated encyclopedia of his beloved Yōkai (Japanese supernatural beings and phenomena), published in this gorgeous hardcover clothbound edition by Ashahi Sonorama, long out-of-print. A must for any lover of the illustrated weird by a master of the genre.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922–2015) was one of Japan’s most respected artists. A creative prodigy, he lost an arm in World War II. After the war, Mizuki became one of the founders of Japan’s latest craze—manga. He invented the yokai genre with GeGeGe no Kitaro, his most famous character, who has been adapted for the screen several times, as anime, live action, and video games. In fact, a new anime series has been made every decade since 1968, capturing the imaginations of generations of Japanese children. A researcher of yokai and a real-life ghost hunter, Mizuki traveled to over sixty countries to engage in fieldwork based on spirit folklore. In his hometown of Sakaiminato, one can find Shigeru Mizuki Road, a street decorated with bronze statues of his Kitaro characters.
VG in VG dj.
2002, English / German
Hardcover (clothbound), 197 pages, 27 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$220.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print and collectible, Gebärden und Ausdruck (Gestures and Expression) is the first comprehensive publication on the work of German artist Kai Althoff (b. 1966). Fully illustrated and conceived by the artist, this beautiful clothbound hardcover book traces the evolution of the Althoff's work from the early nineties until 2002. The texts discuss Althoff’s repertoire of bohemian adolescents, revealing how his untranslatable dialect, hermetic cultural codes and twisted youth motifs are ultimately in service of the work’s epic dimension.
“What is happening here is more a question of the absorption, reduplication, and removal of the core of an existing societal dynamics where convictions, lifestyles, and attitudes previously radically opposed, or even mutually exclusive, have collapsed together into one.” —Anke Kempkes
Edited by Nicolaus Schafhausen with texts By Michaela Eichwald, Anke Kempkes, Bernd Koehler, Jutta Koether.
Fine, As New copy.
2022, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 318 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
The book collection of gay illustrations done under the name of Gekko Hayashi aka Gojin Ishihara.
Gojin Ishihara, once known as an illustrator of monsters in boys’ and girls’ magazines, moved on to pornographic magazines in the 1970s under the name Gekko Hayashi. He was one of the main illustrators for the gay magazine “Sabu” and “Queen”. In the boy’s love magazine, “June”, he became popular among Yaoi (boys’ love) fans for his outstanding drawing skill. He is a pioneer in the genre of boys’ love and his dazzling sensuality still attracts many readers.
Contributions (in japanese) by Tomomi Shibuya (Sociologist), Gengoroh Tagame (Manga artist), Ayumi Nakayama (TACO che bookstore)
2021, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 640 pages, 23 x 18.5 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$145.00 - In stock -
A handsome and hefty clothbound compendium of Lozano’s explorations of gender through drawing,
this 640-page volume comprises drawings from a critical six-year period in the development of American painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano’s (1930-99) practice. Her daring, facetious sketches investigate issues of gender and the body through the erogenous anthropomorphization of tools.
Lee Lozano: Drawings 1958-64 includes two newly commissioned essays by Helen Molesworth and Tamar Garb. “What I love about Lozano—besides the crazy, ham-fisted quality of her drawn line, pictures made with pencils that appear to have been held with a fist—is how her demonstration of the word 'connection' is not bound to any of the anodyne ways we currently use it,” writes Molesworth. “There’s nothing about 'listening' or 'building community' or 'empathy' in any of these drawings. For Lozano, connection is fraught and hairy. Connection is dangerous.”
2018, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$89.00 - Out of stock
This is the first in-depth study of the idiosyncratic ten-year career of Lee Lozano (1930-1999), assuring this important artist a key place in histories of post-war art. The book charts the entirety of Lozano's production in 1960s New York, from her raucous drawings and paintings depicting broken tools, genitalia, and other body parts to the final exhibition of her spectacular series of abstract "Wave Paintings" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. Highly regarded at the time, Lozano is now perhaps best known for Dropout Piece (1970), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture with which she quit the art world. Shortly afterwards she announced she would have no further contact with other women. Her "dropout" and "boycott of women" lasted until her death, by which time she was all but forgotten. This book tackles head-on the challenges that Lozano poses to art history-and especially to feminist art history-attending to her failures as well as her successes, and arguing that through dead ends and impasses she struggled to forge an alternative mode of living. Lee Lozano: Not Working looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures test our assumptions about feminism and the "right way" to live and work.
1994—1997, Japanese
Softcover, various page count, 29.7 x 22.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
SDI nets / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare lot of eight issues of the short-lived and now seldom seen 1990's Shibuya-kei / art subculture magazine from Japan, FREAKOUT, published between 1994—1997. Like a hysterical teenage pop fanzine version of Raygun, FREAKOUT ("The Art Magazine for the New Edge"), packed as much sugar-coated 90's nihilism into the little-known magazine's short life-span as possible. Showcasing a new generation of provocative international artists alongside their Japanese pop (counter)culture counterparts, filled with illustrations, manga, and early vector-art kitsch psychedelia — in short, a demonic embodiment of Shibuya-kei aesthetics — these issues include exclusive interviews and artist features, galleries and articles on Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger, Suehiro Maruo, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, Kyoji Takahashi, Janine Antoni, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Matthew Barney, Nakamura Tetsuya, Manuel Ocampo, Miyamae Masaki, Akira, Junichiro Take, Nancy Burson, Makoto Aida, Jean-Michel Basquiat, KAORUKO, Richard Nonas, and much more... from doll-house TV gore to restroom portraiture.
Includes issue 4, 5, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 (1994—1997)
All Very Good copies, light cover wear.
1982, English / Japanese
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Genko-sha / Tokyo
$100.00 - In stock -
First printing of the first ever book on the work of queer American illustrator Mel Odom (b. 1950), published in Japan in 1982. Profusely illustrated throughout with Odom's dreamy, highly-stylised, erotically-charged fantasy illustrations, made famous adorning the paperback covers of novels by Patrick White and in the pages of Blue Boy and through Odom's award-winning and still lauded tenure at Playboy. Odom's delicate and dreamy men struck a chord with the viewing public. They were finally seeing male figures of lust depicted lovingly, softly, in the sea of aggressive hyper-masculinity that dominated gay aesthetics of the time. Alongside his many masterful works (that owe much to art deco, the silver screen, and pre-Raphaelite sensuality) reproduced together for the first time, First Eyes also includes Odom's childhood drawings, photographic portraits, his sculptural painted masks, and much more. All texts in English and Japanese.
Very Good copy with light tan/wear.
2014, English
Hardcover, 320 pages 25 x 18 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$65.00 - In stock -
German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. Considered by some a mad eccentric and by others a visionary political thinker in his own time, he is now experiencing a revival thanks to a new generation of scholars who are rightfully situating him in the modernist pantheon.
Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is the first collection of Scheerbart’s multifarious writings to be published in English. In addition to a selection of his fantastical short stories, it includes the influential architectural manifesto Glass Architecture and his literary tour-de-force Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention. The latter, written in the guise of a scientific work (complete with technical diagrams), was taken as such when first published but in reality is a fiction—albeit one with an important message. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is richly illustrated with period material, much of it never before reproduced, including a selection of artwork by Paul Scheerbart himself. Accompanying this original material is a selection of essays by scholars, novelists, and filmmakers commissioned for this publication to illuminate Scheerbart’s importance, then and now, in the worlds of art, architecture, and culture.
Coedited by artist Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin, with new artwork created for this publication by McElheny, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a long-overdue monument to a modern master
1981, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 164 pages, 20 x 24.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$100.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful album collecting the graphic works of the eccentric, Danzig-born poet, architectural prophet, and proto-surrealist Paul Scheerbart, edited by Machthild Rausch and published by Verlag Klaus G. Renner, Münich. "Beyond Gallery", reproducing his phenomenal illustrations, alongside texts in German, is a comprehensive overview of the visionary "first Expressionist" and master of the fantastique. Highly recommended.
Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart (1863—1915) was a German author of speculative fiction literature and drawings, best remembered through obscure citations from Walter Benjamin, Walter Gropius, and Bruno Taut. From the late 1880s to his premature death in 1915, he wrote prolifically on science, urban planning and design, space travel, and gender politics, often in the course of a single text. His most celebrated treatise, Glass Architecture (Glasarchitektur, 1914) foretold of a sublime, technocratic civilization whose peaceful world-order was borne from the proliferation of crystal cities and floating continents of chromatic glass, a vision summed up in his aphorism: “Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.” Like his French contemporaries Camille Flammarion, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel, and Alfred Jarry, Scheerbart’s prophetic oeuvre oscillated between themes of technology and aesthetics in a genre known in the Francophone world as fantastique.
Very Good copy with VG dust jacket.
1981, German
Hardcover, 164 pages, 20 x 24.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verlag Klaus G. Renner / Münich
$70.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful album collecting the graphic works of the eccentric, Danzig-born poet, architectural prophet, and proto-surrealist Paul Scheerbart, edited by Machthild Rausch and published by Verlag Klaus G. Renner, Münich. "Beyond Gallery", reproducing his phenomenal illustrations, alongside texts in German, is a comprehensive overview of the visionary "first Expressionist" and master of the fantastique. Highly recommended.
Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart (1863—1915) was a German author of speculative fiction literature and drawings, best remembered through obscure citations from Walter Benjamin, Walter Gropius, and Bruno Taut. From the late 1880s to his premature death in 1915, he wrote prolifically on science, urban planning and design, space travel, and gender politics, often in the course of a single text. His most celebrated treatise, Glass Architecture (Glasarchitektur, 1914) foretold of a sublime, technocratic civilization whose peaceful world-order was borne from the proliferation of crystal cities and floating continents of chromatic glass, a vision summed up in his aphorism: “Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.” Like his French contemporaries Camille Flammarion, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel, and Alfred Jarry, Scheerbart’s prophetic oeuvre oscillated between themes of technology and aesthetics in a genre known in the Francophone world as fantastique.
Very Good copy. No dust jacket.
1977, German
Softcover, unpaginated, 30 x 21 cm
Ed. of 600, signed,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Edition Hundertmark / Berlin
$190.00 - In stock -
First 1977 signed, numbered edition of this wild, occasionally sexually explicit pictorial and literary collaboration between the radical Viennese artists Günter Brus and Dominik Steiger. One of 600 numbered copies, this copy no. 394/600, signed by Brus and Steiger. In the mid-1970s, every Wednesday each of the two artists would receive something from the other on a sheet of paper with which to build a shared work. This is how the series Jeden jeden Mittwoch. Ein Zwoman [Every Every Wednesday. A Novel in Two] arose in 1974, summarised in this 1977 volume of text and images: each double page presents a half, containing either text or drawings, on each side of the fold.
Dominik Steiger (born 1940 in Vienna, died 2014 in Vienna) was an Austrian writer and artist active in the spheres of the Vienna Group and Viennese Actionism. A university drop out, Steiger joined the French foreign legion in 1959 but was dismissed a year later for psychiatric reasons. He is regarded as a significant crossover artist between genres and an important representative of the Austrian avant-garde since the 1950s. From 1961 onwards he lead a vagabond life through Europe and Asia, publishing many books of poetry and prose, in the 1970s exhibiting and publishing drawings and graphic works, his first LP of songs “Wiener Lieder und Gemischte Waisen” was published 1979 by Dieter Roth's Verlag. With artistic contemporaries such as Christian Ludwig Attersee, Hermann Nitsch, Dieter Roth, Arnulf Rainer, and Günter Brus, he developed numerous collaborations throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Günter Brus (born 1938 in Ardning, Austria) is an Austrian artist known for his controversial films, performances, and paintings. He was notably a member of the Viennese Actionist Group alongside Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch. In 1960, the artist’s interest in the paintings of Jackson Pollock led his transition into making performance-based paintings regarding his own body. Many of the Viennese Actionist’s radical acts were intended as reactions to what they considered the ongoing legacy of Nazi fascism in Austrian culture. His 1968 performance Kunst und Revolution, consisted of the artist consuming his own urine, masturbating in public, and vomiting, he was subsequently jailed for six months. Brus currently lives and works in Graz, Austria.
Fine copy.