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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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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.
1981, English
Softcover (staple bound w. brochure), 64 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creative Space / Chippendale
$45.00 - In stock -
Including the Video Plus Group and the 'Sydney Artists Video and Sound Tape, 1979—1980' performances (Laughing Hands, David Chesworth, → ↑ → (Tsk Tsk Tsk), Warren Burt, Chris Wyatt, Eva Karczag, Robert Randall, and Frank Bendinelli) this rare catalogue published on the occasion of the Studio Access Project, an expansive Sydney-wide event during the 1981 Festival of Sydney and a solution to the desperate situation in the arts competing with industry, commerce and residential expansion in the inner city. "If the city is to remain a lively centre for the arts, room must be found for the artist to work." The first show of its kind in Australia, the project, organised by the volunteer-run Creative Space and Art Network attacked the problem by surveying the needs of artists in Sydney, revealing no less than 400 artists from a multitude of disciplines in urgent need of space, then identifying and investigating unused spaces for studios and presentations. "The redevelopment process is continuous and it leaves many buildings empty for long periods of time. In England and America artists have been found to be the perfect in between tenants for these type of properties."
"The Studio Access Project which this catalogue documents, was initiated to introduce the public to some of the artists in Sydney who are working in studios. It is hoped that in this way some idea of the process and not just the product can be communicated resulting in a greater understanding of artist space needs as well as providing the artists themselves with an exhibiting opportunity."
Sadly nothing has changed. If anything it's exceptionally worse, but this document is an important insight into the battle of Australian cultural initiatives to push back against the rampant redevelopment squeeze in this country and reclaim property waste.
With a map of the city and schedules of concerts and exhibitions, the book profiles all of the artists and utilising the many disparate buildings (shop fronts, garages, basements, warehouses...) profusely illustrated with their artworks, graphics, and biographies.
Includes Creative Space brochure inserted.
Very Good with some creasing to top of inserted brochure.
2021, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 23.5 x 28.5 cm
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
WIELS / Brussels
$110.00 - In stock -
Marcel Broodthaers's work is characterized by a complex exploration of the relationship of text and image. This catalog raisonne, prepared by WIELS and developed in close collaboration with the Marcel Broodthaers Succession, is the first to include all of the Belgian conceptual artist's industrial poems created between 1968 and 1972. Borrowing from the aesthetics of industrially manufactured plastic signs, Broodthaers's multi-layered, often enigmatic pictorial poems testify to his interest in the entanglements of language, punctuation, and symbols. In blurring the boundaries between word and image, painting and object, new levels of meaning are made visible. The index is supplemented by a collection of Broodthaers's drawings, writings and "open letters" as well as scholarly contributions that position the poems as a crucial group of works within the artist's oeuvre.
Text by Manuel Borja-Villel
1967, French
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 18 x 21cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Rive Gauche / Rome
$80.00 - In stock -
Lovely 1967 Fèlix Labisse catalogue published on the occasion of a solo exhibition at Galerie Rive Gauche, Roma. Illustrated in black and white with a work list and text by Patrick Waldberg.
Félix Labisse (1905 – 1982) was a French Surrealist painter, illustrator, and designer. He was born in Marchiennes. He divided his time between Paris and the Belgian coast from 1927. In Ostend he met James Ensor, who influenced his work. Beginning in 1931 he designed for the theatre and illustrated many books, including those by Robert Desnos and Marcel Schwob. His paintings often depict fantastical hybrid creatures, often erotic in nature. He painted the first of a series of his famed blue women in 1960; among them is the Bain Turquoise. He was the subject of a film by Alain Resnais, Visite à Félix Labisse (1947). In 1966 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1973 his paintings were shown in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1982.
Very Good copy.
2022, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 500 pages, 23.5 x 32 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Lenz Press / Milan
$400.00 - In stock -
Sealed As New copy of the immediately out-of-print lavish and monumental 500 page collection of works and exhibitions of Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad from 2007–2021, accompanied by newly commissioned texts and a conversation between Ida Ekblad and Agnes Moraux. The most comprehensive book ever published on the artist.
In 500 pages with 398 illustrations, three essays and a conversation with the artist, this long-awaited first monograph on the work of Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad introduces her extensive oeuvre and documents her career from 2007 to 2021, focusing on her art and how she continually challenges it through her own exhibitions. With contributions by Daniel Baumann, Stian Grøgaard, Martha Kirszenbaum and Agnes Moraux.
Published following Ida Ekblad's exhibition FRA ÅRE TIL OVN at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2019.
Ida Ekblad (born 1980) is a Norwegian painter, sculptor, publisher, music producer, curator, and designer. She also writes. Her sources of inspiration include folk art, fashion, garbage, Samuel Beckett, youth culture, the natural forces of the elements, Gena Rowlands, traditional crafts, and so on. Everyday life is central to her work—as an imposition, but also conveying grace; as a voracious monster and a source of happiness; as a disaster and a glimmer of hope—for in Ekblad's view, everything is full of promise, including art.
Ida Ekblad studied at Central Saints Martins in London, the National Academy of Art in Oslo, and at the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles. She participated in the Venice Biennale (2011, 2017) as well as in numerous international group exhibitions. Ekblad has presented solo exhibitions at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2021); Kunsthalle Zürich (2019); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2019); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2018); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2017); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2010); and Bergen Kunsthall (2010), among others.
Edited by Daniel Baumann.
Texts by Daniel Baumann, Stian Grøgaard, Martha Kirszeunbaum, Agnes Moraux.
Graphic design: Dan Solbach.
2024, English / German
Hardcover, 315 pages, 30 x 30.2 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
König Galerie / Berlin
$95.00 - In stock -
A pioneering figure of 1980s neo-expressionism and an important inspiration for the Neue Wilde painters, K.H. Hödicke, who die in February 2024, was best known for his variegated depictions of Berlin, where people, landscapes, and architecture take on an almost folkloric quality. This lavish over-sized hardcover catalogue comprises is profusely illustrated with paintings and sculptures produced between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, including works in which Hödicke portrays West Berlin during the division of Germany. Foreword by Timon Karl Kaleyta, text by Andrew Hunt, and an Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist. All text in English and German.
Karl Horst Hödicke (1938–2024) was a contemporary German artist known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings. The artist’s broad brushstrokes and specific colour palette provide his works with a sense of seeing a place through memory – specifically Berlin with its ever-changing cityscape was a central motif in his work. Having moved to Berlin in 1957, Hödicke became one of the spokespeople for a small group of impetuous young lateral thinkers who wanted to revolutionise painting. No sooner had German post-war modernism rejoined the international artistic trend towards the abstract than they revolted against this new doctrine with a revival of figurative painting, which had been declared obsolete. Hödicke was subsequently a pioneer of German Neo-Expressionism and New Figuration with Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorf, and A.R. Penck. He was one of the main protagonists and drivers of the New Savages or Junge Wilde movement in 1978, which arose in the German-speaking world in opposition to established minimal and conceptual strategies.
2024, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 29.8 x 24.8 cm
Published by
Silvana / Milan
Palais Lumière / Évian-les-Bains
$85.00 - In stock -
Man Ray occupies a prominent place in the history of 20th-century art. A versatile artist, who lived mainly in Paris, he is best known as a photographer. Indeed, he was one of the first to use photography, not as a simple means of reproduction, but as a genuine creative medium, turning the technique into an art form. Some of his photographs, such as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Noire et blanche (1926), have achieved iconic status.
Born in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) on 27 August 1890, Emmanuel Radnitsky, known as Man Ray (as in a ray of light), actively participated in the intellectual and artistic circles of New York. He discovered the European avant-gardes and befriended Marcel Duchamp who opened the doors of Dadaism to him and welcomed him to Paris in July 1921.
At the heart of Parisian artistic life, he participated in the innovative experiments of the Dadaists and Surrealists, met with painters, poets and intellectuals, and became famous for his portraits. He developed a career as a fashion photographer, notably for designers Paul Poiret and Elsa Schiaparelli. A tireless experimenter, he rediscovered the technique of “photograms” (abstract silhouettes of objects) that Tristan Tzara named “rayographs” and in 1929, with his new partner Lee Miller, developed the “solarization” technique. In 1940, after the fall of France, Man Ray left for the United States and met Juliet Browner, who became his wife and muse. He returned to Paris in 1951 and lived there until his death in 1976.
Man Ray is renowned for having revolutionized the art of photography, but he was also a painter, draughtsman, assembler of objects, sculptor, writer and filmmaker. It is this protean artist that we seek to discover or re-discover, through a true panorama of his works, which will enable us to comprehend Man Ray’s creative process and the importance of his art.
Edited by Robert Rocca, Pierre-Yves Butzbach.
Texts by Robert Rocca, Pierre-Yves Butzbach, Serge Sanchez, Man Ray, Sylvie Gonzalez, Laurence Benaïm, Marie-Pierre Ribère, Jean-Michel Bouhours.
2024, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 12 x 18.5 cm
Published by
After 8 Books / Paris
$48.00 - In stock -
Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.
An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”
“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.”—from the foreword by Lynne Cooke
“What I adore in this book is first that it doesn’t abide by any category, nor proposes any definition for what queer art or culture could be or for what research in art history should be, even expanded to certain comforting genealogies or influences.
On the contrary, the actual disparity of “events” is at the core of the book, and shapes its narrative. It allows Nick Mauss to associate, affiliate, link and weave a “widely inscrutable web,” in which the author and the reader shift their positions and points of view, constantly redirecting the conversation. What I adore in this book is that Nick Mauss tells what art, whatever it is, does to him.”—Elisabeth Lebovici
“In these cruel times, when too many operate as if ignorance, popularity, and money set the metronome of meaning, Nick Mauss, beneficent as Mother Ginger, lifts a flounce to release his polichinelles of untimely thinking. Easy to imagine Tina Chow and Edwin Denby, critical representatives of the knowing hereafter, nodding their approval at these keen syncopations to now’s drab, monocultural rhythm.”—Bruce Hainley
“These pages are written through a sensuous eye; encounters with art are laid bare and made tactile. With an insistent curiosity that is generous and imagistic, Mauss makes contemporaries of predecessors, creating connective tendrils and textures that generatively rupture the past. I cannot help but feel that the artworks and practices written about here love and revel in being witnessed and revisited by Mauss. They are seen-touched and responded to without closure or fixity; in the artist’s words, they ‘'cast long shadows forward.”—Lotus L. Kang
“This is the book I want to be reading right now.”—Josephine Pryde
Edited by Antonia Carrara and Benjamin Thorel.
Foreword by Lynne Cooke.
Design by Marco Caroti.
2024, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$34.00 - In stock -
With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo into English for the first time. These texts, never published during her lifetime, presented something of a missing chapter, and offered the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief, and an ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.
This new, expanded volume brings together the painter’s collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, and exercises in Surrealist automatic writing, as well as prose-poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific On Homo rodans: an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, the essay utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles.
Also included are newly discovered writings, among them three short stories, never before published in any language.
Edited and translated by Margaret Carson
Remedios Varo (1908–1963) was a Spanish-born painter who entered the Surrealist circle in Paris before the German occupation forced her into exile to Mexico at the end of 1941, where she would stay until the end of her life. Her dream-infused allegorical works combine the elements of classical training, alchemical mysticism, and fairy-tale science.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 325 pages, 23 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Andre De Rache / Brussels
$220.00 - In stock -
First edition of the best, most comprehensive reference book on the work of French—Belgian Surrealist artist Felix Labisse, and one of the only publications on the artist in the English language. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w, including many photographs of Labisse's life and artistic circles, with extensive accompanying essays by the great Surrealist biographer and author Patrick Walberg, including chapters: Gayant's child; The Ostend clan; The Wizard of Families; Behind the Scenes of the Party; Devil's Transvestites. Highly recommended.
Félix Labisse (1905—1982) was a self-taught French Surrealist painter, illustrator, and designer. He was born in Marchiennes. He divided his time between Paris and the Belgian coast from 1927. In Ostend he met James Ensor, with whom he became friends for life. In 1927 he set up his own studio there, influenced by his contact with the Ostend artists Ensor, Constant Permeke and Léon Spilliaert. Labisse mainly worked with oil on canvas. Beginning in 1931 he designed extensively literature and for the theater. In 1951 he staged the play Le Diable et le Bon Dieu by Jean-Paul Sartre at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris and in 1954 he staged the play Les Mystères de Paris by Albert Vidalie under the direction of Georges Vitaly at the Theater La Bruyere in Paris. Labisse's work was also influenced by Paul Delvaux and René Magritte. Describing his own work as 'libidoscaphes', his paintings depict fantastical hybrid creatures, heavy with motifs of eroticism and Freudian themes. He painted the first of a series of his iconic blue women in 1960; among them is the Bain Turquoise. He was the subject of a film by Alain Resnais, Visite à Félix Labisse (1947). In 1966 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1973 his paintings were shown in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1982.
Patrick Waldberg (1913—1985) was a Franco-American art critic known for his profiles of Surrealist artists. Born in Santa Monica, California, Waldberg moved to Paris as a child with his family. In 1932, and while still a student (age 19), he joined Boris Souvarine's Democratic Communist Circle. There he met Georges Bataille and his friends Michel Leiris and André Masson, and was initiated by them into a wild night life. 1937 saw him back in California to take care of "family matters", however, a letter from Georges Bataille reached him there, urging him to return to Paris in order to take part in a Nietzschean secret society Bataille was then forming, called Acéphale ("headless"). Waldberg heeded the call in September 1938, and he says this permanently changed his life. From 1938 to 1940 Waldberg would serve as the secretary of Bataille's "official" group, the College of Sacred Sociology. In 1959 he left Paris to move to the French village of Seillans, where his second wife Line Jubelin was from. Max Ernst and his own second wife Dorothea Tanning joined him there. Their houses are now a Max Ernst museum and a Maison Waldberg museum.
Very Good in VG dust jacket — copy, light wear/age only.
2021, English
Hardcover, 104 pages, 16.8 x 24.2 cm
Published by
JBE / Paris
$55.00 - In stock -
A revelatory, long-overdue survey of the bold and explicit feminist painting of Betty Tompkins, from the late 1960s to the present.
This first monographic work on the New York – based feminist painter Betty Tompkins (born 1945) presents around 50 paintings and drawings made during her career. Tompkins is best known for her large-format Fuck Paintings , a series launched in 1969 depicting close-up sex, the source images of which are taken from pornographic magazines. The series is famous for having been censored many times. In this and other series, such as the Cunt Paintings and Pussy Paintings , Tompkins uses a cold and restricted palette of black, white and gray for the pornographic images that she appropriates. Stylistically close to photorealism, the images are cropped and produced with an airbrush on pastel backgrounds. Sometimes the artist covers up the image with misogynistic texts.
Although her paintings were rarely shown, due to their explicit content, Tompkins has influenced a younger generation. She has not ceased to question persistently since the 1970s what determines the codes of representation of female bodies. This work thus takes on a new dimension within the framework of the recent #MeToo movement.
In this essential volume, collages and drawings reveal Tompkins' work processes, highlighting her grid work, a major form of minimalism and formalism. Among the works on paper, the 2014 Photo Drawings series is unveiled here for the first time.
2019, English
Hardcover (debossed cloth), 236 pages, 21.7 x 27.3 cm
Published by
The Metropolitan Museum of Art / New York
Yale University Press / New Haven
$99.00 - Out of stock
A fascinating reassessment of the work of one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century, emphasizing his Argentine background and interdisciplinary approach to both art and life
A major figure of postwar European art and a binational resident of Argentina and Italy, Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) blurred numerous boundaries in his life and art, crossing borders both literally and figuratively. This volume takes a fresh look at the renowned artist whose simultaneous innovations in painting, drawing, ceramics, and sculpture, as well as his spatial explorations, pushed the painterly into the sculptural and redefined the relationship between the arts.
Evaluating Fontana’s interest in synthesis and moving beyond his famous slashed canvases, this book reveals Fontana to be one of the first installation artists. Essays by international experts address his work from both an Italian and Argentine perspective, providing numerous insights into Fontana’s expansive practice. Archival images of environments, public commissions, installations, and now-destroyed pieces accompany lavish illustrations covering his production from 1930 to the late 1960s, establishing a new approach to an artist who responded to the political, cultural, and technological thresholds that defined the mid-20th century.
Edited by Iria Candela; With essays by Emily Braun, Enrico Crispolti, Andrea Giunta, Pia Gottschaller, and Anthony White
Iria Candela is Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
2012, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 287 pages, 24 x 31.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Skira / Milan
Rizzoli / New York
MOCA / Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art / Chicago
$200.00 - Out of stock
First and only edition of this incredible out-of-print book, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962 is the first book (and exhibition) to focus on one of the most significant transnational developments in contemporary abstract painting: the artist’s literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the physical and psychological destruction wrought by World War II—especially the existential crisis resulting from the atomic bomb—artists ripped, cut, burned, and affixed objects to the canvas in lieu of paint. Destroy the Picture emphasizes this internationally shared artistic sensibility in the context of devastating global change and dynamic artistic dialogues, offering an innovative and expansive view of art making in the postwar period.
As artists from war-torn countries like Italy and Japan—including Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Kazuo Shiraga, and Shozo Shimamoto—channeled their ruined surroundings into artistic form; artists throughout the world—such as Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle in France, John Latham in the United Kingdom, Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou in the United States, Otto Müehl in Austria, and Manolo Millares in Spain, among others—pursued similar approaches and strategies. Destroy the Picture presents an opportunity to reconsider the profound repercussions of this remarkably coherent approach in painting, from artists’ early experiments with translating gestures into materials to their emphasis on a rupture between two and three dimensions, as well as the expansion of the painting medium to incorporate performance, assemblage, and time-based strategies. In many cases, the exhibition places the work of now-established artists back into the radical context in which it originally emerged.
Organised by Paul Schimmel, former Chief Curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the exhibition and this remarkable accompanying hardcover catalogue mark the first time that these strategies have been considered together as a coherent mode of artistic production, expanding the scholarship on this critical moment in history. Alongside major essays by Paul Schimmel, Nicholas Cullinan, Astrid Handa-Gagnard, Shoichi Hirai, Sarah-Neel Smith, and Robert Storr, Destroy the Picture is heavily illustrated throughout with works dating 1949 and 1962 by artists from eight countries, including Lee Bontecou, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Salvatore Scarpitta, Kazuo Shiraga, Gérard Deschamps, François Dufrêne, Jean Fautrier, Adolf Frohner, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, John Latham, Gustav Metzger, Otto Müehl, Manolo Millares, Saburo Murakami, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Shozo Shimamoto, Antoni Tàpies, Chiyu Uemae, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, and Michio Yoshihara.
Very Good—Near Fine copy in Very Good—Near Fine dust-jacket.
1995, English
Softcover + 7" Flexi Disc (Sonosheet), unpaginated, 21 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$400.00 - In stock -
Rare very first (black and gold) 1995 edition, hand-assembled and limited to 800 copies!
Destroy All Monsters started out as an anti-rock band: four midwestern art students — Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, and Niagara — with a mission to subvert the airwaves. Between 1975 and 1979, they produced six issues of DAM Magazine, a barrage of Kelley's perverse cartoons, Shaw and Loren's wild Xeroxed collages, and shots of the band; Niagara did a lot of the cover designs, and everything was crudely printed on cheap paper. "The images that drove us were the strange combinations of film noir, monster movies, psychedelia, thrift-shop values, and the relentless anarchy of an over-stimulated pop culture", recalls Cary Loren. This compilation is the definitive DAM document: hundreds of drawings, photos, Xeroxed artwork, collages, reviews, profiles, and personal manifestos, many works unpublished and unseen before — plus a flexi-record bound into the book (first printing and first pressing of this 1975 recording).
A total of three editions of “Geisha This” were produced and all are out-of-print. Each version was printed in different colours, with a different metallic cover and hand collated in a different sequence, containing new and different contents.
This version (the very first edition), has a cover design by Niagara printed in GOLD metallic ink on BLACK cardboard cover stock. The entire first printing was 800 copies, strikingly printed with dozen’s of multicoloured inks (fluros, metallics), silk-screened and spray-painted pages, with many paper stocks, all hand-assembled, printed, designed and edited by Cary Loren, with artwork and texts by Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Loren and Niagara.
Very Good copy of the first edition in black, a stunning document, complete with the brand new Flexi Disc (Sonosheet) in its first pressing.
1993, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Whitney Museum / New York
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$300.00 - Out of stock
Still, and will probably always be, the best book on Mike Kelley. First edition, now very collectible. This definitive survey was published in 1993 in conjunction with "Mike Kelley", a travelling exhibition held at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LA; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, throughout 1994. Mike Kelley, one of the leading Californian artists of the 1990s, was a proponent of abject or pathetic art, an anti-aesthetic, anti-heroic movement, which criticized social and artistic issues through banality and humour. Exploring the work of this great and controversial performance artist and sculptor at the mid-way point in his career, this dense book presents thirteen essays, plus an introduction, discussing Kelley's projects, performances, and the ideas and diverse influences that motivate his work - contemporary art, rock and roll, social commentary and pop culture. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, with texts by Elizabeth Sussman, David Marsh, Richard Armstrong, Timothy Martin, Howard Singerman, Colin Gardner, Dennis Cooper & Casey McKinney, John Miller, Ralph Rugoff, Kim Gordon, Howard N. Fox, Diedrich Diederichsen, Jutta Koether, Martin Prinzhorn, Paul Schimmel, John G. Hanhardt. No less! Includes a bibliography and exhibition history. Catalogue designed by Lorraine Wild and ReVerb.
Highly recommended.
Very Good copy, tightly bound, no spine creases. Light cover edge wear.
2006, English
Hardcover (debossed faux leather bound + 7"), 26 x 23 cm
600 numbered copies,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Hysteric Glamour / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
Published in 2006 by fashion brand Hysteric Glamor in a numbered edition of 600 copies, bound in padded debossed faux leather hardcover with a 7" record, "the book is a monograph of my late 1970s photographs of my friends, the avant-garde rock group Destroy All Monsters."—Sue Rynski, Detroit photographer. Described by legendary critic Lester Bangs as "anti-rock", Destroy All Monsters was an influential Detroit rock band formed in 1973 by University of Michigan art students Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, legendary femme fatale Niagara, and filmmaker Cary Loren, existing to 1985 with shifting personnel and sporadic performances since. Performing their first concert at a comic book convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on New Year's Eve of 1973, the group combined elements of punk, psych, metal and noise rock with a heavy dose of experimentation and performance art, influenced as much by ESP-Disk, Sun Ra and The Velvets, as monster movies and Futurism. The cult group earned a measure of notoriety through their coveted DAM Magazine, also due to members of The Stooges and MC5 joining the band, and Sonic Youth singer/guitarist Thurston Moore compiling a three compact disc set of the group's music in 1994.
"Born in 1954, year of the birth of rock and roll, I grew up immersed in the high energy music of my hometown Detroit. This loud, physical, emotional music took hold and became a part of me."—Sue Rynski
A stunning book published by Hysteric Glamor director Nobuhiko Kitamura, with editorial direction by : Osamu Wataya, Michitaka Ota (Sokyusha), and Koichi Hara. 7" includes the tracks "Rocking the Cradle" and "Little Boyfriend" by Destroy All Monsters.
Near Fine copy.
2003, English / Japanese
Softcover (die-cut, embossed stiff slipcase w. internal illustrated card fold-out sleeve), 92 pages, 22 x 30 cm
Signed by artist,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$450.00 - In stock -
First, deluxe edition of this rare Hajime Sorayama book published by Treville especially for the exhibition 'Hajime Sorayama - The Exhibition' at Ginza Graphic Gallery in 2003. Now out-of-print and collectible, this extra special copy is also signed by Sorayama himself on the cover "cleavage". Housed in an embossed, die-cut corset slipcase, with an illustrated, fold-out "pin-up" doubled-sided internal sleeve, both made from stiff card, this catalogue is profusely illustrated throughout with Japanese airbrush master Hajime Sorayama's erotic, futuristic, hyper-realistic illustrations with a heavy emphasis on latex and bondage mistresses. Includes his own commentary throughout (in English and Japanese), plus a special look inside his atelier.
Hajime Sorayama (b. 1947) is a Japanese illustrator famed for his precisely detailed, erotic portrayals of feminine robots and fetish pin-ups, and also well-known for his design work on the original Sony AIBO. He describes his highly detailed style as "superrealism", which he says "deals with the technical issue of how close one can get to one's object."
Very Good copy.
1998, English / Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 37 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Sakuhinsha / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Scarce first Japanese hardcover edition of Japanese master of erotic fantasy illustration Hajime Sorayama's absolute classic Torquere (Torture), published in 1998. Following the success of best-seller NAGA, Sorayama's Torquere delves deeper into the darker realm of fantasy fetishism and, as the title suggests, into the world of Sadomasochism. This lavish over-sized volume is illustrated cover-to-cover with Sorayama's most explicit works presented in dramatic, glossy full-colour throughout. Rare in this original hardcover edition.
Hajime Sorayama is revered for his erotic airbrushed illustrations of humanoid robots that explore ideals of femininity and beauty. Drawing on pinup pictures, Sorayama published the first book of his signature “Sexy Robot” series of chromium-plated figures in 1983. Decades later, these striking works have sold for more than $500,000. Sorayama started his career in advertising before freelancing in Hollywood, where he helped to produce visuals for sci-fi films. His illustrations gained widespread attention in 1995, when Penthouse began featuring them in a monthly column. While Sorayama has enjoyed a particular cult status for his sensual cyborgs —who appear empowered rather than objectified —he has also received mainstream commercial attention. Sony enlisted him to produce the first designs for its robotic dog AIBO, which won the grand prize for Japan’s Good Design Award in 1999. Sorayama has also worked with fashion titans such as Thierry Mugler and Dior on projects that have extended his illustrations into the realm of wearables, sculpture, and performance.
Near Fine copy.
1984, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 98 pages (w. fold-outs), 42 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$190.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of H.R. Giger's Necronomicon from 1984. Beginning with a hommage from Salvador Dali and introduction by Clive Baker, the first in this series of oversized and visually overwhelming Giger-designed volumes takes us through the early history of one of the most brilliant fantasy artists of the century. From his "Passegen" series, his work for theatre, posters, album artwork, environments, personal works, is designs for Alejandro Jodorowsky's DUNE, and much more, all beautifully reproduced in full-colour and black and white, full-bleed spreads, including fold-out pages. These Giger folio books have become very desirable, collectable editions in their various printings around the world, the series encompassing the work of one of the world's most unique and influential visionaries of the macabre. This is volume 1 of 2 of "HR Giger's Necronomicon" where Al Azred's legendary magical book of the most wonderful abominations and perversions, "Necronomicon" (made infamous in the pages of HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu" mythology), becomes a visual reality!
With an introduction by Clive Baker and numerous texts by HR Giger as well as texts by Fritz Billeter and Simon Vinkenoog and a tribute from Salvador Dali. Note: Japanese language edition.
First Japanese edition, published by Treville, Tokyo, in 1984. Very good copy throughout with Very Good dust jacket. Some edge wear with fragile, oversized edition.
1987, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 98 pages (w. fold-outs), 42 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$190.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of H.R. Giger's Necronomicon II, the second oversized and visually overwhelming Giger-designed collection that takes us further through the incredible history of one of the most brilliant fantasy artists of the century. Reproducing Giger's award-winning work for the film ALIEN, his paintings, environments, sculptural works, his work for never shot film "The Tourist", collaborations with Blondie's Debbie Harry, his "New York City" series from the late 1970's and much more, all beautifully reproduced in full-colour and black and white, full-bleed spreads, including fold-out pages. Also includes interviews, texts, biography. These Giger folio books have become very desirable, collectable editions in their various printings around the world, the series encompassing the work of one of the world's most unique and influential visionaries of the macabre. This is volume 2 of 2 of "HR Giger's Necronomicon" where Al Azred's legendary magical book of the most wonderful abominations and perversions, "Necronomicon" (made infamous in the pages of HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu" mythology), becomes a visual reality!
First Japanese edition, published by Treville, Tokyo, in 1987. Very good copy throughout with Very Good dust jacket. Some edge wear with fragile, oversized edition.
2023, English / German
Hardcover, 240 pages, 35 x 26 cm
Published by
Scheidegger und Spiess / Zürich
$190.00 - In stock -
A unique visual foray into the fantastic worlds of artist H.R. Giger.
The art of H.R. Giger (1940-2014), Swiss-born creator of the legendary monster in Ridley Scott's movie Alien, is currently experiencing a renaissance and is featured in exhibitions as well as in magazines around the globe. This lavish large-format volume offers never-before-seen insights into Giger's private house and garden, both of which are populated by biomechanical sculptures, airbrush paintings, Alien furniture, objects, prints, and self-portraits. French photographer Camille Vivier—best known for her work for Stella McCartney and Cartier—enjoyed exclusive access to the artist's Zurich home and studio for this book, where she worked on her own as well as with models in a series of photo sessions.
Vivier's around 200 photographs form an atmospheric tribute to the arguably most distinguished representative of Fantastic Realism. In addition to images of Giger's studio and his life-size sculptures, Vivier has also documented some hundred objects and artworks, as well as his famous Alien-style garden railroad.
An essay by French publicist Farbrice Paineu places H.R. Giger's art in the wider context of pop culture and the genre of horror movies.
Edited by Beda Achermann.
Text in English and German.
1981, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 194 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1981 hardcover edition.
The problem of representation is at the heart of the intellectual ferment experienced in recent years by many different fields of inquiry. The essays in Allegory and Representation confront head on the erosion of the ground rules for representation—the principles upon which a set of stable correspondences are posited between image and object, symbol and reality, sign and referent.
The contributors to this volume reflect an unusual diversity of disciplines, from English, French, American, Slavic, and Italian literature to the history of art. Yet they all confront, through their local and particularized studies, a common problem. Paul de Man and Joel Fineman characterize allegory (and, more generally, representation) as a paradox built upon its own undoing. Robert M. Durling and Michael Fried both discuss the use of the artist's own body within a work of art to achieve a fusion of representation with that which is represented. Hugh Kenner and Leo Bersani each contrast opposing modes of representation—for Kenner, a "poetics of sunlight" and a "poetics of the cave"; for Bersani, an art that drives violently toward narrative closure and an art that remains open and unfinished. Michael Holquist redefines the problem in political terms and explores representation in the writings and career of Mikhail Bakhtin.
Taken together, these essays reveal what may be called the cunning of representation: the resiliency, brilliance, resourcefulness with which artistic prac tice has responded to the artist's perennial craving to reveal truth and reality and to the nagging dread that they lie just barely out of reach.
Allegory and Representation, the fifth collection of papers from the English Institute to be published by Johns Hopkins, con tinues the Institute's tradition of pioneer ing fresh approaches to the study of litera ture. It will be of interest to both students ind scholars working in the field, as well as to anyone concerned with the theory and dynamics of art.
Stephen J. Greenblatt is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, His most recent book is Renaissance Self Fashioning From More to Shakespeare
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2024, English
Hardcover, 144 pages, 26.1 x 21 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
The first-in depth publication to critically investigate the impact of Pope.L’s early performances on his career. With contributions by Stuart Comer, C. Carr, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Adrienne Edwards, Darby English, Malik Gaines, Danielle A. Jackson, Adrian Heathfield, EJ Hill, Thomas J. Lax, Andre Lepecki, Yvonne Rainer, Martine Syms, Martha Wilson.
Pope.L (b. 1955) is a consummate thinker and provocateur whose practice across multiple mediums – including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, theatre and video – utilizes abjection, humour, endurance, language and absurdity to confront and undermine rigid systems of belief. Spanning works made primarily from 1978 to 2001, member: Pope.L, 1978-2001 features a combination of videos, photographs, sculptural elements, ephemera and live actions. This volume, published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, presents a detailed study of thirteen early works that helped define Pope.L’s career. It features essays by curators, artists, filmmakers and art historians, plus an intervieww and artistic interventions by the artist. These components are supplemented by thirteen detailed plate entries that highlight key details of each work. The entries engage performances that are rooted in experimental theatre such as Egg Eating Contest (1990) and Aunt Jenny Chronicles (1991) as well as street interventions such as Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), ATM Piece (1996), and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001-2009), among others. Together these works highlight the role of that performance has played within a seditious, emphatically interdisciplinary career that has established Pope.L as an influential force in the history of contemporary art.
1985, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages + catalogue insert, 25 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$100.00 - Out of stock
Rare glossy catalogue published on the occasion of a major "Survey Exhibition" of Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1985, curated by Peter Cripps and Malcolm Enright. Heavily illustrated throughout with MacPherson's works and installations mostly at the IMA, but also Q Space Annex and Ray Hughes Gallery. Includes informative text by then IMA director and artist Peter Cripps tracing the major works of MacPherson from his first solo exhibition in 1975 (also held at the IMA) through to 1985. Also includes biography, bibliography and loose-leaf fold-out illustrated catalogue enclosed.
Over the course of his 40 plus-year career, Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson (1937–2021) explored the philosophical propositions of what constitutes a work of art. He often incorporated familiar imagery, everyday materials and visual elements from daily life, honouring the beauty of the mundane. MacPherson’s fascination with systems of objects and language is manifested through broad fields of knowledge, including art history and social history, biology and mythology.
Very Good copy.
1974, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Ed. of 250,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Robert Jacks / New York
$200.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful, very rare artist's book published by Australian artist Robert Jacks in 1974 whilst in New York in an edition of 250 copies to distribute to friends and acquaintances. The book (almost textless, apart from image captions and title page) is a crucial document of this important period in Jacks's career, comprising photographic documentation of all of the exhibition installations by Jacks during his time in New York and Toronto after 1968. As Ian Burn noted in his important 1970 essay ‘Conceptual art as art’, Jacks’s "recent work in New York has moved beyond painting into conceptualized presentation of numeral systems and serial techniques". Jacks’s first opportunity to present this new work was facilitated by Sol LeWitt, who selected him to inaugurate a rolling program of free exhibitions at the New York Cultural Centre in January 1971 – the ‘International Artist’s Invitational’ – with each exhibiting artist showing just a single work and selecting the artist to follow. Further exhibitions include the New York Cultural Centre, the Whitney Museum Artists Resource Centre, 112 Greene St. Gallery, and Resse Palley, all New York, plus A Space, Toronto, all documented herein.
Robert Jacks (1943—2014) was one of Australia’s most significant and accomplished abstract artists. Jacks studied sculpture at Prahran Technical College from 1958–1960 and painting at RMIT in 1961–62. His first solo exhibition, a sell-out at Gallery A in Melbourne, was held to great acclaim in 1966 and in 1968 his work was included in the landmark exhibition, The Field, at the National Gallery of Victoria. Jacks left Australia in 1968, spending ten years living and working in Canada and the United States. It was during this period, much of which was spent in New York's Soho, in which Jack was invited to exhibit by Sol LeWitt and Robert Rauschenberg at the New York Cultural Centre in 1971. When he returned to Australia in 1978, Jacks brought back a finely-tuned, mature visual language and experience that makes him a unique figure within the history and development of twentieth century Australian art. Over the subsequent decades, Jacks was collected by every state gallery, the subject of numerous monographs and honoured with a retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014. In 2001, the Bendigo Art Gallery established an art award in Jacks' honour.
Very Good, mild age/wear, mild rust to staples.