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.
2022, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 23.5 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$105.00 - Out of stock
The first overview in a decade on Kubin’s gothic pageant of dreamworld menace. The quickly out-of-print English edition.
The art of the great Austrian draftsman, illustrator and author Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) appears more current today than ever before: for it was violence, wartime destruction, pandemics, natural disasters, the manipulation of the masses and other abysses of human existence that pervaded his highly narrational works. The oeuvre of this fantastical creator confronts us with pessimistic visions which – to quote Schopenhauer – delineate “the worst of all possible worlds”. Kubin’s nightmarish oeuvre extends Symbolism and the fantastical art of the 19th century and may be considered a precursor to French Surrealism, with its syntheses of actual and imaginary reality, its bleak realms that Kubin often seasoned with humor, irony and exaggeration.
Published for an exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Alfred Kubin: Confessions of a Tortured Soul offers an exploration of Kubin’s oneiric worlds in terms of their relation to the unconscious. Through this lens, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist August Ruhs addresses pieces by Kubin selected by curator Hans-Peter Wipplinger. In addition, Kubin’s works are placed into a dialogue with works by artists of the 19th century and of the classical modernism from which Kubin derived inspiration. Artists such as Francisco de Goya, Félicien Rops, James Ensor, Max Klinger, Odilon Redon, Gustav Klimt and Edvard Munch shaped Kubin’s vocabulary of motifs and formal aesthetics, as did authors such as ETA Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Gérard de Nerval, August Strindberg and Gustav Meyrink his literary sources of inspiration.
2023, English
Softcover, 592 pages, 21.6 x 28 cm
Published by
Printed Matter Inc. / New York
$95.00 - In stock -
Dear Jean Pierre collects David Wojnarowicz’s transatlantic correspondence to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage between 1979 and 1982. Capturing a truly foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, these letters not only reveal his captivating personality – and its concomitant tenderness, compassion, and neuroses – but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.
Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, the band 3 Teens Kill 4, the publication of his first photographs, his early friendship with Peter Hujar, his participation in the then-emerging East Village art and music scenes, and the preparations for the publication of his first book. Included with these writings are postcards, drawings, xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, ephemera, and contact sheets that showcase some of the artist’s iconic images and work, such as the Burning House motif and Untitled (Genet, after Brassai).
Beyond these milestones, the book offers a striking portrayal of Wojnarowicz as a twenty-something, detailing his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age and the softness of love and longing. This disarming tenderness provides a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and the love he has found in it.
Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s correspondences have largely been lost, leaving us with only a revelatory glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years.
1978, English
Softcover, 260 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Phaidon / London
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1978 softcover edition of The Dawn of Italian Painting 1250—1400 by Alastair Smart.
"The history of early Italian painting from about 1250 to 1400 constitutes one of the richest and most inspiring chapters in the history of European art. In his illuminating introduction to this important but much neglected period, Professor Alastair Smart argues that the early Italian masters — among them Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Simone Martini, and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — should be seen as artists concerned with the values of their own time, and not merely as precursors of the Renaissance. The traditional view of these artists as 'primitives' has led critics in the past to misunderstand and undervalue their art. The mood of the Dugento and the Trecento was one of discovery and innovation, and yet, as Professor Smart shows, the preservation of vital and cher- ished traditions was often equally significant.
This is a period about which much still remains to be learnt, and exciting finds are constantly being made. It is also a period which has given rise to many art-historical controversies, and Professor Smart re-examines many of the most important of these vexed questions, bringing the arguments up to date in the light of the latest evidence.
The illustrations, which include 15 colour plates, convey a sense of the purity and freshness of early Italian painting, qualities which cannot fail to impress and delight any visitor to Italy's great churches and galleries. The book's usefulness to student and layman alike is enhanced by the inclusion of a detailed bibliography. Alastair Smart is head of the Department of Fine Art at the University of Nottingham and Director of the University Art Gallery. He is the author of many books and articles, both on early Italian painting and on other subjects, including studies on Constable and Allan Ramsay.
Very Good copy.
2012, English
Hardcover, 272 pages, 26.5 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
The Metropolitan Museum of Art / New York
Yale University Press / New Haven
$90.00 - In stock -
Dürer and Beyond presents a selection of 100 works from the Metropolitan Museum's outstanding collection of German, Swiss, Austrian, and Bohemian drawings. Featured are numerous drawings by Albrecht Dürer, including his celebrated study sheet with a self-portrait. In addition to drawings by major artists such as Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Urs Graf, Hans Holbein the Younger, Friedrich Sustris, and Wenceslaus Hollar, the selection also highlights work by lesser known but equally superb draftsmen from the 14th to the end of the 17th century. Richly illustrated and fully documented with artist biographies, comparative illustrations, and enlightening commentary on the variety, quality, and purpose of the featured drawings, this book makes a significant scholarly contribution to a field that has not been widely explored.
Stijn Alsteens is Curator and Freyda Spira is Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press.
Out-of-print, As New copy.
1953, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 80 pages, 26.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Karl Robert Langewiesche Verlag / Königstein im Taunus
$20.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful 1953 Albrecht Dürer monograph published by Karl Robert Langewiesche Verlag in Königstein im Taunus, Germany, as part of the Die blauen Bücher art book series. Profusely illustrated throughout with stunning colour and b/w plates of the great German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance, with accompanying text by Johannes Beer in original German.
Good copy with good dust jacket. Some foxing/tanning to page edges.
2009, English
Hardcover, 550 pages, 22 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$400.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce, highly sought after, and most comprehensive book ever published on American artist Paul Thek, published in 2009 by MIT Press. Edited by Harald Falckenberg and Peter Weibel, this enormous 550 page monograph contains more than 300 works by this groundbreaking artist, documenting his journey from legendary outsider to central figure in many contemporary art movements.
Paul Thek occupied a place between high art and low art, between the epic and the everyday. During his brief life (1933-1988), he went against the grain of art world trends, humanizing the institutional spaces of art with the force of his humor, spirituality, and character. Twenty years after Thek's death from AIDS, we can now recognize his influence on contemporary artists ranging from Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, as well as Kai Althoff, Jonathan Meese, and Thomas Hirschhorn. This book brings together more than 300 of Thek's works—many of which are published here for the first time—to offer the most comprehensive display of his work yet seen. The book, which accompanies an exhibition at ZKM ? Museum of Contemporary Art presenting Thek's work in dialogue with contemporary art by young artists, includes painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation work, as well as photographs documenting the room-size environments into which Thek incorporated elements from art, literature, theater, and religion. These works chart Thek's journey from legendary outsider to foundational figure in contemporary art. In their antiheroic diversity, Thek's works embody the art revolution of the 1960s; indeed, Susan Sontag dedicated her classic Against Interpretation to him. Thek's treatment of the body in such works as “Technological Reliquaries,” with their castings and replicas of human body parts, tissue, and bones, both evoke the aura of Christian relics and anticipate the work of Damien Hirst. The book, with more than 500 images (300 in colour) and nineteen essays by art historians, curators, collectors, and artists, investigates Thek's work on its own terms, and as a starting point for understanding the work of the many younger artists Thek has influenced.
Essays by Jean-Christophe Ammann, Margrit Brehm, Bazon Brock, Suzanne Delehanty, Harald Falckenberg, Marietta Franke, Stefan Germer, Kim Gordon, Roland Groenenboom, Axel Heil, Gregor Jansen, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Susanne Neubauer, Kenny Schachter, Harald Szeemann, Annette Tietenberg, Peter Weibel, Ann Wilson.
Good copy with heavy tanning to spine and covers (esp. fluro spot colour), some bumping to cover corners, light page edge tanning. Internally Very Good, clean throughout.
2010, English
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 304 pages, 24.8 x 28.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$220.00 - Out of stock
Now well out-of-print, the incredible Paul Thek monograph, was published by Yale University Press in 2010 to accompany Thek's first retrospective in the United States, at the Whitney Museum in New York.
An American sculptor, painter, and installation artist, Paul Thek (1933—1988) is primarily known for hyper-realistic works of human body parts executed in fleshlike beeswax and for his strongly symbolic, room-size installations constructed from transitory materials. A major figure on the 1960s New York art scene, Thek also spent time in Europe, where he paved the way for artists adopting collaborative strategies. Although he gained a large following and was featured in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions, the anti-establishment "artist's artist" was practically forgotten at the time of his death. Major exhibitions abroad and critical attention from younger artists have done much to revive his reputation, and Paul Thek: Diver expands on those efforts by bringing the artist's resounding influence on the art world up to date. Published to accompany Thek's first retrospective in the United States, this landmark publication includes nearly 300 chronologically arranged illustrations of sculptures, paintings, prints, and other works featured in the exhibition as well as four special "in-depth" image sections focusing on key installations, projects, and pages from the artist's journals. An extensive selection of documentary photographs, many never before published, illuminate Thek's artistic aesthetic and production process. With a bibliography, exhibition history, and checklist of works in the exhibition, this overdue acknowledgment of Thek's brief, but broad-reaching career will be the authoritative volume on the artist for years to come.
Edited by Lynn Zelevansky and Elisabeth Sussman, Contributions by George Baker, David Breslin, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Eleonora Nagy, Susanne Neubauer, Michael Nickel, Scott Rothkopf, Ann Wilson
Very Good—Fine copy in VG dust jacket.
2023, English / Italian
Softcover, 112 pages, 21 x 28 cm
Published by
Humboldt Books / Milan
$50.00 - In stock -
A collection of works reflecting the influence of Italy on Paul Thek's artistic trajectory, with several contributions highlighting his Italian period.
Paul Thek's Italian experiences between 1962 and 1976 left a deep mark on his sensitivity. From his visits to the Capuchin Catacombs to his witnessing of spectacular religious processions, Italy was a catalyst for several key moments in the artist's career, triggering an elusive reaction in his practice to the trajectories of post-war American art. By reworking the stimuli gathered during his stays in Rome, on the island of Ponza and in Sicily, Paul Thek concocted a baroque response to Pop Art and Minimalism, which were dominant on the art scene of the time.
Paul Thek. Italian Hours brings together a selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures through photographs by Peter Hujar, presented in the exhibition of the same name at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome. The critical text by Peter Benson Miller, curator of the exhibition, highlights Thek's meaningful dialogue with a group of artists linked to gallery owner Topazia Alliata who were working in Italy at the time, including Cy Twombly and Piero Manzoni. A conversation between Watermill Center curator Owen Laub and theatre director Robert Wilson completes the volume.
A recognized figure on the American art scene, Paul Thek (1933-1988) produced an astonishingly diverse body of work (drawings, sculptures, paintings, installations and environments) that is consistent with his image as an elusive artist, perpetually on the move. During his lifetime, Thek was exhibited by the most important New York galleries (Stable Gallery, Pace Gallery). His work was also presented at documenta 4 and 5 in Kassel (1968, 1972), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1969), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1971), and the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne (1973). He was supported in particular by Harald Szeemann and Jean-Christophe Ammann. In 1977, Suzanne Delehanty curated Processions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, marking the first solo exhibition of Paul Thek's work in an American institution. Following his death in 1988, his work was mainly shown in Europe. First in 1992, in Italy, with the Paul Thek exhibition at Castello di Rivara. Then, in 1995, Paul Thek – The Wonderful World That Almost Was opened in Rotterdam at the Witte de With and subsequently traveled to Berlin, Barcelona, Zurich and Marseille. In 2008, the ZKM in Karlsruhe programmed Paul Thek Artist's Artist, which also explored how Thek's work has resonated in the contemporary scene. On the other side of the Atlantic, it wasn't until 2010 that the Whitney Museum in New York dedicated a remarkable retrospective to Thek, whose title, Paul Thek: Diver, emphasized the artist's passion for the sea.
Texts by Nicola Del Roscio, Peter Benson Miller, Owen Laub, Robert Wilson.
Graphic design: Francesca Biagiotti.
1994, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 22 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition of this important study of 18th-century Venetian school painter and print-maker Giovanni Battista Tiepolo by Svetlana Alpers, published in 1994 by Yale.
Tiepolo is an example of the specifically pictorial intelligence. This book is both a study of his art and an argument for fuller recognition of the peculiarities of the painters' representational medium. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall locate distinctive modes of Tiepolo's representation of the world and human action; follow his process of invention from first pen drawings through small oil-sketches to great frescoes; and analyze his best and biggest painting, the "Four Continents", in the Stairway Hall of the Prince-Bishop's Residence at Wurzburg, which is illustrated with photographs specially taken for the book. The topics taken up include: painting's resistance to enacted narrative drama, its engagement with indeterminacies and repetitions, the senses in which painters may "perform" both past art and themselves, the constructive roles of gestural drawing, the exploitation of shifts of scale between design and finished work, the dialogue between the changing natural site lighting and in-picture lighting, contributions made by the beholder's own mobility, the expressive scope of tensions between two and three dimensions, the deep rationale of rococo formal structure, and the sources of the moral force of pictures that lack an explicit moral. The book - both art criticism and a practical polemic - ends with an annotated gazetteer for travellers, listing those Tiepolo paintings that can still be seen in the places and conditions for which he painted them.
1968, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 29 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Weidenfeld and Nicolson / London
$130.00 - In stock -
First 1968 UK hardcover edition of Heaven and Hell in Western Art by celebrated Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes (1938—2012), published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
"The themes of Heaven and Hell are among the most fruitful and varied in all Western art. Robert Hughes discusses their changing forms in a book which illustrates many of the finest and most interesting works of art devoted to these images. The author discusses the traditional Christian doctrine and also the psychological implications of a subject which has had a powerful hold on the imagination of artists over the past thousand years. Hell and the Devil have always been graphically depicted, and in Robert Hughes' book we can see the gradual development of their traditional forms. The devil, who started as the beautiful fallen angel Lucifer, becomes the obscenely ugly figure carved on the great Romanesque churches and illustrated so terrifyingly throughout the Middle Ages, only to degenerate into the harmless satyr of the Renaissance, and to the comic figure of the popular melodrama. Hell, described so articulately by Dante, is most vividly represented in the Last Judgments by Signorelli and Michelangelo, in which medieval fears are expressed with all the immediacy of Renaissance realism. The joys of Heaven are less easy to set forth in visual terms, and alongside actual representations of Heaven there has been a tradition of metaphorical paintings of Heaven, from Duccio's Maestà to the Arcadia of Claude and Poussin and later. Heaven itself developed from the walled garden of medieval imagination to the trompe l'œil ceilings of the Baroque era, often showing highly unlikely candidates being received by the Heavenly host. Robert Hughes surveys this whole field, and concludes with some reasons why the themes of Heaven and Hell have lost their force in this present century. This book illustrates many great works of art, with many fascinating and unusual details, and presents an aesthetic and psychological interpretation of these works by one of the leading young art-critics of the present day.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with only light wear (preserved under mylar wrap).
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 346 pages, 29 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$50.00 - In stock -
First 1982 hardcover edition of the first modern study in English of sixteenth-century Venetian painting and a modern critical framework for the general study of art.
Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice explores the visual tradition of one of the most important centres of the Italian Renaissance through a study of three masters - Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. These painters dominated and shaped the traditions of Venetian painting in the High and Late Renaissance. Establishing the conditions of painting in Renaissance Venice, including the social, economic and political situation of arts and artists and the aesthetic values that distinguish Venetian painting from that of Central Italy, David Rosand also explores the formal principles and technical procedures that determined the uniqueness of painting in Venice, above all the development of oil painting on canvas. He also analyses individual images, altarpieces and mural paintings within the several contexts of conventions and institutions - artistic, social, historical - of Renaissance Venice.
Good book with ex-libris markings, otherwise VG book in VG dust jacket (no library markings to DJ, preserved under mylar wrap).
1983, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 244 pages, 32 x 35.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hudson Hills Press / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
First hardcover 1983 edition of Masterpieces of Italian Drawing in the Robert Lehman Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by George Szabo, long out-of-print.
"The Robert Lehman Collection, now a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, represents a unique chapter in the history of art collecting and connoisseurship. Its master drawings rank high among all the world's collections, especially — because of their sheer number, great variety, and extraordinary quality — the Italian drawings. Here are magnificent sheets by many of the greatest masters of the Italian Renaissance and beyond: Pollaiuolo, Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Signorelli, Bronzino, Tintoretto, Cambiaso, Veronese, Carracci, Canaletto, Guardi, Piranesi, the Tiepolos, and 38 more. Each of these masterpieces from Italy's incomparable flowering of draughtsmanship is reproduced in this splendid volume in a full-color plate of astonishing fidelity and delicacy, and each is accompanied by a biography of the artist and a full commentary (including provenance and bibliography). The author is Dr. George Szabo, Curator of the Lehman Collection since 1963. In addition to his fascinating texts on the individual drawings, his Introduction provides a short history of the collecting of Italian drawings in New York, a history of the Lehman family and Collection, and an extensive discussion of Italian paintings and decorative arts in the Collection, especially as they relate to the drawings. An additional 82 works of art appear within the Introduction in rich duotone; more than half of these are drawings, and the balance are paintings, majolica, illuminated manuscripts, bronzes, sculptures, furniture, and jewelry. A comprehensive bibliography completes Masterieces of Italian Drawing in the Robert Lehman Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will be treasured by all lovers of drawings, of Italian art, and of fine book making."
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket. Tanning/discolouration to jacket edges/spine, small closed tears to top of spine. VG book with only light wear.
1982, German
Softcover, 128 pages, 29 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Maximilian Verlag / Munich
$50.00 - In stock -
Gorgeous German catalogue published for the first edition of Erste Konzentration, a series of three portfolios of 12 prints by 6 artists : Georg Baselitz, Antonius Höckelmann, Jörg Immendorff, Per Kirkeby, Markus Lüpertz, A.R. Penck, published in a limited edition of 50 copies, signed, numbered and dated. Includes wood, linocut, and lithograph prints. This beautifully printed catalogue reproduces 6 of the prints of each artist in colour and b/w on stiff art paper, accompanied by text by curator/author Alexander Dückers and biographies of each artist.
Very Good copy with only light edge wear to cover. From the collection of artist Bernhard Sachs (name to front endpaper).
1986, German
Softcover, 360 pages, 27.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Edition Cantz / Stuttgart
Württenbergischer Kunstverein / Stuttgart
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1986 edition of this huge survey of German artists, Künstler in Deutschland 1900-1945. Individualismus und Tradition, published by Edition Cantz and Württenbergischer Kunstverein. Profusely illustrated with the work of Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Dexel, Oskar Schlemmer, Rudolf Belling, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Ludwig Meidner, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Franz Radziwill, Christian Schad, Josef Scharl, Otto Pankok, Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Hans Hartung, Emil Nolde, Hans Uhlmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Winter, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Otto Mueller, Willi Baumeister, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Hölzel, August Macke, Franz Marc, Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee. Texts in German by Tilman Osterwold, Jens Christian Jensen, Andreas Vowinckel, plus biographies and catalogue.
Good copy with wear to cover edges and spine.
1983, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 27.9 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Prestel / Munich
The Saint Louis Art Museum / Saint Louis
$45.00 - Out of stock
1983 exhibition catalogue surveying the Neue Wilde neo-expressionism and the re-emergence of expressive painting in late 1970s and 1980s Germany, published in conjunction with show organized by Jack Cowart and held at The Saint Louis Art Museum, June—August, 1983. Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the work of the artists included in the exhibition : George Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, A.R. Penck, and Markus Lüpertz. Essays by Jack Cowart, Siegfried Gohr, and Donald B. Kuspit. Critical bibliography by Renate Winkler.
This copy stuffed with loose archival clippings on above artists from German magazine Stern, from around the same period (documenta 7, 1982).
Good copy but with spots of heavy wear to the cover and general wear.
1985, German
Softcover, 736 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Nationalgalerie / Berlin
$40.00 - In stock -
Enormous 700+ page volume about "Art in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945—1985", published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, September 27, 1985—January 21, 1986. Profusely illustrated in colour with many works by Vostell, Baselitz, Beuys, Polke, Richter, Palermo, Klapheck, Darboven, Schultze, Uecker, Horn, Lüpertz, Haacke, Ruthenbeck, Antes, the Bechers, Rinke, Gerz, Erhard Walther, Penck, Knowles, Higgins, June Paik, Maciunas, Christiansen, Filliou, Brecht, Kriwet, Roth, Ulrichs, and many more, accompanied by texts in German, bibliography and index.
Good copy, some rubbing to the cover boards, light wear, bumping with age/size.
2023, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 120 pages, 27.9 x 27.9 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
This volume showcases the works of Thaddeus Mosley and Frank Walter (1926–2009). Mosley, self-taught and son of a Pennsylvania miner, uses salvaged wood to create large-scale abstract forms. Walter, from Antigua, expresses the beauty of his homeland’s landscapes through paintings and woodwork.
1981, German
Softcover, 150 pages, 26.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunstmuseum Bonn / Bonn
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce 1981 Blinky Palermo book published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Palermo (Peter Heisterkamp)' at Kunstmuseum Bonn, 22 Sept — 1 Nov, 1981. One of the best books on Palermo, this volume is profusely illustrated throughout with works in colour and b/w, paintings, objects, drawings, installations, photographs, accompanied with text by Dierk Stemmler, biography, chronology of works, exhibitions, and more. Texts in German.
Blinky Palermo (1943—1977), born Peter Schwarze, Heisterkamp his foster surname, was a German abstract painter. He adopted his outlandish name in 1964, during his studies with Bruno Goller and Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1962 and 1967, in reference to Frank "Blinky" Palermo, an American Mafioso and boxing promoter who managed Sonny Liston. In 1969, Palermo moved to Mönchengladbach and set up a studio he would share with Imi Knoebel and Ulrich Rückriem. After a stay in New York in the early 1970s, he moved into Gerhard Richter's former Düsseldorf studio. Over the course of his 14-year artistic career Palermo tirelessly probed the limits of abstract painting. Having begun his brushwork on more traditional surfaces, he shifted his activity to less conventional supports, experimenting with diverse materials and forms, exploring the relationships that can exist between the wall and the space delimited by the painting. Under Beuys, he became increasingly interested in the organized spatial relationship between form and colour, a polarity which is manifest throughout the rest of his oeuvre. In the mid 1960s, Palermo moved away from conventional rectangular canvases and increasingly opted for surfaces such as the circle, triangle, cruciform, totem pole and even the interior walls of buildings. Between 1964 and 1966, Palermo produced a small series of paintings on canvas in which he experimented with constructivist principles of order. Over the course of his short life, Palermo participated in more than seventy exhibitions worldwide, including Documenta in 1972 and the Venice Biennale in 1975. Blinky Palermo died in 1977, aged 33, during a trip to the Maldives.
Very Good copy with only light shelf wear to blue covers, light bump to top corner.
2023, English
Hardcover, 312 pages, 23 x 26.5 cm
Published by
RM / Barcelona
$135.00 - In stock -
The first overview in a decade of the dazzling Surrealist universe of Leonora Carrington—artist, author, occultist, feminist.
In recent years, the art and fiction of Surrealist painter and author Leonora Carrington have received much mainstream recognition, but—until now—there has been no authoritative overview of her work. Divided into 10 sections, Revelation introduces Carrington’s singular artistic universe, displaying an extensive array of her wide-ranging creations (including paintings, drawings and tapestries) and fusing a chronological narrative of her life with a study of the most prominent themes in her work—from her training and early influences in England and Florence to her contact with the Surrealists in Paris, through her time in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, her traumatic experiences in Spain, her immigration to New York and her new homeland in Mexico. Punctuating the reproductions are archival materials, book excerpts and documentary photographs.
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a British-born artist, Surrealist painter and novelist, famed for her narrative scenes inhabited by mystical figures participating in curious rituals. After fleeing Europe during World War II, she lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, where she was a founding member of the women's liberation movement.
2004, English
Softcover (staple bound), 16 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$18.00 - In stock -
Exhibition guide published on the occasion of Sigmar Polke, History of Everything, at the Tate London in 2004. Introduces the German artist Sigmar Polke (1941—2010) and surveys the major themes/developments in his work, illustrated throughout with examples in b/w and colour. Includes full schedule of exhibition events, etc.
Good copy with wear and spine pinching, rubbing to cover from another small book.
2023, English
Hardcover, 184 pages, 30.5 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Art Institute of Chicago / Chicago
Museo de Arte Moderno / Mexico City
$85.00 - Out of stock
This major new hardcover publication offers a definitive look at the artistic practice of Remedios Varo (1908–1963) following her emigration from Spain to Mexico City in 1941. Her work from 1955 to 1963 made a lasting contribution to modern art and the legacy of Surrealism. In Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, fresh historical and material findings establish the integral relationship between Varo’s layered interests—in alchemy, architecture, magic, mysticism, philosophy, and science—and her beguiling technical approach to art making. Essays detail specific works’ complex stories and spectacular surfaces. An illustrated taxonomy of Varo’s artistic techniques, including automatic mark making as well as careful manipulation of materials and media, offers new insights into the artist’s craft. An illustrated inventory of a major portion of Varo’s library—published here for the first time—reveals the artist’s engagement with a wide range of subjects. Stunning new photography of many of her artworks are presented within a dynamic geometric design inspired by the artist’s work. Situating Varo as a woman working in midcentury Mexico City and living among a tight-knit community of local and emigre artists, poets, and thinkers, the catalogue illuminates the complex worldview that shaped her search for individual and collective transcendence.
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 376 pages, 16.5 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$120.00 - In stock -
ince the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term "heterosexual" and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnés. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.
‘Ladies and gents, welcome to the museum of the erotic doll. Step right up and feast your eyes on modern man’s curious contraptions. If the saucy blow-up doll makes you squeamish, brace yourself for the Dutch Wife (a sailor’s delight!), lubricating robot ladies, surrealist brides stripped bare, state-of-the-art RealDolls, and the iDollators who love them. Marquard Smith is the curator of this collection of men's dolls, rendered in a lavishly illustrated volume.’—Laura Frost, Times Higher Education
'This book is platypus-like, unclassifiable.'—Marina Warner, London Review of Books
“[An] intriguing book . . . Smith teases out the history of these sex objects to provide a thorough genealogy of today’s erotic mannequins.”—Shelly Ronen, Public Books
1999 / 2006, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 240 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Kokushokankokai / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful hardcover monographic study on the work of Czech Surrealist artist, puppeteer, animator, and filmmaker, Jan Švankmajer (b. Prague, 1934), first published in Japan in 1999. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with all of his film and artworks, including his sculpture, collage, ceramics, “tactile experiments”, and much more. With chapters such as "Manipulation of malicious intent", "Everything starts with a doll", and "Realistic delusions, grotesque dreams", the book is largely made up of conversations with Jan Švankmajer, his own diaries on the making of "Faust" and other subjects, extensive texts and dialogues with the artist relating to central themes in his work, from the "Tactile Imagination" to Alchemy. It also provides a full chronology of the artist, a complete filmography, a list of his works, and bibliography of the artist. Texts are
Well-known for his dark re-imaginings of well-known fairy tales and for his avant-garde merging of live action, stop-motion animation and puppetry, Švankmajer is one of the most distinctive and acclaimed Czech filmmakers. Since the mid-1960s, his films have shocked, mesmerized, repulsed and delighted audiences, amassing international cult-like following. His prolific work off-screen across assemblage and collage mediums, using both man-made and organic materials, share the central thematic elements of his subversive films, such as black humour, metamorphosis, sex, decomposition, mythology, scatology, death, humour and the absurd. Over 300 illustrations with texts by Hideto Fuse, Maki Kumagai, Petr Holly, Jan Švankmajer.
Fine copy, As New.
2011, Japanese / Czech
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 180 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Access / Japan
$90.00 - In stock -
Scarce exhibition catalogue surveying the work of Czech Surrealist artists Jan and Eva Švankmajer, published to accompany a major retrospective in Japan in 2011. Eva Švankmajerová (1940 – 2005, b. Eva Dvořáková in Kostelec nad Černými lesy), was a renowned painter, ceramicist, and writer active in the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group who's poetry and prose regularly appeared in the journal Analogon. Švankmajerová was married to the Surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer (b. Prague, 1934) and collaborated on many of his award-winning animated masterpieces, including Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) and Otesánek (2000). Lavishly illustrated throughout, this catalogue includes chapters on Jan and Eva Švankmajer's independent and collaborative works, spanning painting, objects, collage, ceramics, poetry, graphics, and their highly acclaimed animated film works. Also includes Jan Švankmajer's collaboration with Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Includes detailed history, list of works and accompanying texts, alongside production insights and studio photography.
As New copy.