World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
1976, English
Softcover, 432 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Vision / London
$55.00 - In stock -
First softcover edition of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, published by Vision in London in 1976. Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures in twentieth-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
This early autobiography, first published in 1942, which takes him through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. On its first publication, the reviewer of Books observed: It is impossible not to admire this painter as writer. As a whole, he ... communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in short the concept of life and the total picture of himself he sets out to portray. Dalí's flamboyant self-portrait begins with his earliest recollections and ends at the pinnacle of his earliest successes. His tantalizing chapter titles and headnotes—among them Intra-Uterine Memories, Apprenticeship to Glory, Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts, Dandyism and Prison, I am Disowned by my Family, My Participation and my Position in the Surrealist Revolution, and Discovery of the Apparatus for Photographing Thought—only hint at the compelling revelations to come.
Here are fascinating glimpses of the brilliant, ambitious, and relentlessly self-promoting artist who designed theater sets, shop interiors, and jewellery as readily as he made surrealistic paintings and films. Here is the mind that could envision and create with great technical virtuosity images of serene Raphaelesque beauty one moment and nightmarish landscapes of soft watches, burning giraffes, and fly-covered carcasses the next. For anyone interested in twentieth-century art and one of its most gifted and charismatic figures, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí is essential reading.
Illustrated with photographs of Dalí and his works, and scores of Dalí drawings and sketches. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier; introduction by Robert Melville.
Good copy, creasing to covers, light general wear.
2007, English
Hardback (w. dust jacket), 242 pages, 21 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$45.00 - In stock -
As a very young artist in training at the academy in Madrid, Salvador Dalí worked in two distinct modes a highly detailed naturalism (under the influence of the return to order”) and a more avant-garde, cubist-derived style that owed much to Picasso (whom Dalí visited in Paris in 1926). Then, in 1927, the twenty-three-year-old artist, influenced by André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 and the paintings of such artists as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, began to move towards Surrealism. In the spring of 1929, to coincide with the shooting of Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, Dalí organized his first Paris exhibition, thereby gaining acclaim as a full member of the surrealist movement.
This book offers a wealth of new material about Dalí’s formative years as a young artist in Spain and first years in Paris. Fèlix Fanés, one of the most knowledgeable Dalí scholars in the world, transforms perceptions of the artist and shows how the stage was set for the emergence of Dalí’s mature artistic personality. With a fresh and detailed assessment of Dalí’s truly revolutionary work, Fanés reveals the central role of the artist not only in the development of the Surrealist movement but also the course of 20th-century art.
Out-of-print, As New copy.
1979, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 238 pages, 32 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Park Lane / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
First English hardcover edition of this monographic on Salvador Dalí by Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, published by Park Lane in 1979.
This book is a tribute to two great Spanish personalities of our century, the painter Salvador Dali and the writer Raman Gomez de la Serna. When Raman Gomez de la Serna undertook a study of Salvador Dali, Dali himself promised to illustrate the text with original drawings. Unfortunately, the death of the writer in 1963 prevented the project from being realized until recently, when the study, almost complete, was discovered posthumously among his papers. Dali kept his word and this magnificent book is the result.
Supported by other writings, photographs, and illustrations, Dali is made up of three sections. The first of these is largely composed of the essay and the drawings, with a note by the Spanish scholar Sebastian Grasso on Ramon Gomez de la Serna, and a chronology which charts the life and works of the surrealist artist. The second section contains more than 80 color reproductions of Dali's works....
Lavishly illustrated in paintings, drawings, Dalí's home, studio, furniture, musuem, testimonials, and much more.
Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures in twentieth-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Puig (3 July 1888 in Madrid – 13 January 1963 in Buenos Aires) was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel.
Very Good in Good dust jacket, some edge wear.
1982, English
Softcover, 34 pages, 17.5 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Alternative Museum / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
Extremely scarce, lovely catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Visual Politics", curated by Geno Rodriguez at the Alternative Museum in New York, 1982.
Featuring the work of Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Francesc Torres, Sonia Balassanian, Benedict J. Fernandez, Daniel Kazimierski, Despo Magoni, Juan Sanchez, Randy Lee White, amongst others. Illustrated throughout with the artworks featured in the exhibit, plus biographical info for each artist and a foreword essay by Robert H. Browning.
Very Good with light edge tanning with age.
1976, English
Softcover, 234 pages, 28 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Da Capo Press / New York
$15.00 - Out of stock
First softcover edition of this heavy volume from 1976, Pattern: A Study of Ornament in Western Europe 1180-1900 ( Volume I: The Middle Ages), first published by Clarendon Press in Oxford in the 1930s. Profusely illustrated throughout, this extensive study traces the development of European ornamental art from the beginning of the Gothic period in France to the end of the Middle Ages, explaining and illustrating in fascinating detail the Pastoral vision of nature used in art of every sort, as well as the rise of Decorative Heraldry. Includes bibliographical references.
Good copy with light wear to covers.
1971, German
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 264 pages, 18.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Propyläen-Verl / Berlin
$15.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this catalogue raisonne of lithographs by German painter, sculptor and graphic artist, Paul Wunderlich (1927—2010). Illustrated heavily throughout, this wonderful and extensive reference book of graphic works by Wunderlich was compiled by the artist, together with gallerist Dieter Brusberg, and accompanied by texts from art historians and philosophers Max Bense, Hanns Theodor Flemming, Fritz J. Raddatz, Frank Whitford, and others.
Paul Wunderlich (1927—2010) is known for his erotic, Surrealist-inspired paintings, prints, and sculptures featuring mythological imagery. A pioneer of Magic Realism, Wunderlich received the Japan Cultural Forum Award and the Kunstpreis des Landes Schleswig-Holstein among other accolades. Despite his iconic works being held in some of the world’s most prominent museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Wunderlich remains an “artist’s artist.” He studied graphic arts at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg; he later learned printmaking techniques from Oskar Kokoschka and Emil Nolde. His early paintings displayed an abstract, Tachist style, although he embraced figuration in the late 1950s and he developed his characteristic style. He portrayed dismembered figures and sexually provocative imagery reminiscent of the Surrealists, but also influenced art movements such as Art Deco and Art Nouveau. His work was critically received as so scandalous that, in 1960, his lithograph series Qui s’explique (1959) was seized by authorities in Hamburg, and he often had trouble with raids that destroyed his works. Paul Wunderlich was married to photographer Karin Székessy in 1971, and the couple pursued art projects together.
Average copy as the fragile glue has deteriorated and many pages are loose, though all are present.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 830 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
documenta / Kassel
$80.00 - Out of stock
First English edition of this monumental 830 page book for documenta X, the last documenta of the twentieth century and the first directed by a woman, the French curator Catherine David, brings together the work of more than 100 of the world's foremost thinkers, writers, and artists in an extraordinary anthology of seminal texts and images of, on, and about the development of Western cultural and critical theory since 1945.
The book "seeks to indicate a political context for the interpretation of artistic activities at the close of the twentieth century, through a montage of images and documents from the immediate post-war period to the present. The range of material treated here is not encyclopaedic; it represents a polemical attempt to isolate specific strands of artistic production and political endeavour which can be taken as references in the contemporary debate over the evolution of our societies. Drawing from distinct yet interrelated territorial and linguistic domains, the book singles out complex cultural responses to the unifying processes of global modernity."—from the book jacket.
A comprehensive work in itself, rich with enmeshed texts and illustrations of artworks, film stills, historical documents throughout in colour and in black and white.
Writers include: Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Celan, Amílcar Cabral, Masao Miyoshi, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière, Tadao Sato, Youssef Ishaghpour, Josef Beuys, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rem Koolhaas, Sandra Álvarez de Toledo, Witold Gombrowicz, Herve Joubert-Laurencin, Jean-François Chevrier, Marguerite Duras, Edward Said, Henri Alleg, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Uwe Johnson, Jerzy Grotowski, James Clifford, Primo Levi, Pierre Clastres, Andrea Branzi, Fabrizio Gallanti, Gérard Chaliand, Stig Björkman, Daniel Defert, Saskia Sassen, Catherine David, Benjamin Buchloh, Paul Virilio, Serge Daney, Étienne Balibar, Nadia Tazi, and many others.....
Artists include : Archigram, Martin Kippenberger, Archizoom Associati, Art & Language, Hans Haacke, Oyvind Fahlström, Samuel Beckett, Franz West, Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig, Nancy Spero, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Jörg Herold, Fischli & Weiss, Dan Graham, Robert Adams, Peter Friedl, Paweł Althamer, Liam Gillick, Mike Kelley & Tony Oursler & Diedrich Diederichsen, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ed van der Elsken, Walker Evans, Aldo van Eyck, Heiner Goebbels, William Kentridge, Ulrike Grossarth, Richard Hamilton, Vito Acconci, Raymond Hains, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Siobhán Hapaska, Ecke Bonk, Carsten Höller & Rosemarie Trockel, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Lois Weinberger, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, Olaf Nicolai, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte, Marc Pataut, Gordon Matta-Clark, Christian Philipp Müller, Matt Mullican, Antoni Muntadas, Jean-Luc Moulène, Reinhard Mucha, Álvaro Siza, Toyo Ito, John C. Portman Jr., Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Mariella Mosler, Josef Beuys, Steve McQueen, Chris Marker, Lothar Baumgarten, Jean Dubuffet, Kerry James Marshall, Maria Lassnig, Rem Koolhaas, Joachim Koester, Suzanne Lafont, Sigalit Landau, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Brassaï, Le Corbusier, Antonin Artaud, and so many more...
Very Good coy, light wear. Good dust jacket with some creasing and edge wear.
1983, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 22 pages, 26.6 x 18.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
George Paton Gallery / Melbourne
$180.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, exceptionally rare catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Comic Stripping at George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, May 31—June 24 1983. Features the work of Howard Arkley, Julie Cunningham, Juliet Darling, Juan Davila, Linda Marrinon, Raymond X, Peter Tyndall, Christopher Van Der Craats, → ↑ →. Illustrated throughout with work and texts by the artists and an introduction by Denise McGrath.
Very Good copy with ex-libris 200 Gertrude St. archive stamps to contents and final page of catalogue. Small mark, soft surface tear from old sticker to bottom-left of cover, otherwise a lovely copy with only light wear.
1997, English
Softcover (tri-fold, double-sided card), 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Bendigo Art Gallery / Bendigo
$10.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of Peter Tyndall's Dreaming Bendigo into Being at Bendigo Art Gallery, Oct 24—Nov 30, 1997. Tri-fold, double-sided card, illustrated throughout with Tyndall's artworks and visual references (including those specific to the Bendigo region), alongside text by Tyndall.
Peter Tyndall (b. Melbourne, 1951, lives and works in Hepburn Springs).
Since the 1970s, Peter Tyndall’s paintings, drawings and prints engage with recursive relationships between art, language and meaning. He is known for his use of graphic lines, text and comic-style illustration. Tyndall’s art reflects and disrupts historical perspectives on art. His ongoing project (since 2008) is a blog entitled bLOGOS/HA HA, which offers commentary on unfolding contemporary history.
As New copies.
1999, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$15.00 - Out of stock
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Same As It Ever Was, curated by Clare Firth-Smith at 200 Gertrude Street in 1999. Exploring a techno-logic of cultural, the link between modernism and a late-90's techno sensibility, the exhibition included work by Damiano Bertoli, Andrea Blundell, Nadine Christensen, Clare Firth-Smith, Julian Holcroft, Katherine Huang. Texts by Daniel Palmer and Julian Holcroft, alongside list of works exhibited.
Fine copy.
1988, English
Softcover (tri-fold, double-sided card), 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$70.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Howard Arkley — Casual Works : Working Drawings, Source Material, Doodles 1974—1987, at 200 Gertrude St., Fitzroy, May 5—May 28, 1988. This ambitious and inventive exhibition involved Arkley’s auto-survey of his own career to date, through a series of black and white air-brushed works-on-paper, shown with selected examples of related ‘source material’ and minor works on paper. Tri-fold catalogue offset printed on stiff card, designed by Ian Robertson, illustrated throughout with Arkley's drawings and pictorial references (the cover featuring a photo of Monash University’s Menzies Building, one of the source images) accompanied by the essays "Art in The Urban Environment" by Richard Brown, and "All Teeth and Hunger" by Virginia Trioli.
Very Good, As New copy.
1988, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
City Gallery / Melbourne
$40.00 - In stock -
Catalogue for the 1988 exhibition La Boheme at City Gallery, Melbourne. Curated by John Nixon, featuring Howard Arkley, Peter Cripps, Aleks Danko, John Dunkley-Smith, Lyndal Jones, John Nixon, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson.
As New copy.
1969, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of "Australian Abstract Art", an essay by Australian art historian and academic Patrick McCaughey (born 1942 in Dublin, Ireland), published in 1969 by Oxford University Press under their "National Gallery Booklets" series. Includes illustrated examples of Roy de Maistre, Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson, John Olsen, Elwyn Lynn, Norma Redpath, Lawrence Daws, Clement Meadmore, Robert Jacks, Sydney Ball, Dale Hickey, Richard Havyatt.
Fine copy with light tanning.
1969, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 21.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Books / Melbourne
$18.00 - Out of stock
First 1969 edition of "A Guide to Modern Australian Painting", published by Sun Books, Melbourne. "The first paperback book on modern Australian art", this small but generous volume, traces the extraordinary developments in Australian art for the "student, connoisseur or 'just plain curious'".
Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the work of Ian Fairweather, John Olsen, Brett Whiteley, John Coburn, Robert Grieve, Sydney Ball, Col Jordon, Stanislaus Rapotec, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Donald Friend, Sir William Dobell, Lloyd Rees, Jon Molvig, James Gleeson, Robert Juniper, Clifton Pugh, Jacqueline Hick, Leonard French, John Brack, Lloyd Rees, Russell Drysdale, Elwyn Lynn, Ken Reinhard, David Boyd, David Aspen, and many more.
Foreword by author R.K. Luck, and followed by details of plates, biographical notes on all featured artists, list of main Australian galleries and bibliography.
Good-Very Good copy.
2002, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$15.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the First Birthday Exhibition of Metro 5 Gallery, May - June, 2002, coinciding with the world exclusive release of the gold sculptures of Sidney Nolan (depicted on the cover and within). Features the work of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Dale Hickey, John Brack, John Firth-Smith, Hoawrd Arkley, Robert Jacks, Roger Kemp, Yvonne Audette, Albert Tucker, James Gleeson, John Perceval, Tim Storrier, Brett Whiteley, and many others. Illustrated throughout in colour with press release and room-sheet price-list enclosed.
Very Good copy.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$46.00 - Out of stock
Foreword by Rachel Kushner
Preface by Alexandra Truitt
"Impressive . . . Truitt lyrically looks back on 80 years of life. . . . [T]hese daily entries . . . offer a version of Truitt free of artifice as she meditates on the sacred and mundane. . . . This sparks with intelligence."—Publishers Weekly
In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921-2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to "let the artist speak." These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death.
In Yield, Truitt's unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21.3 x 14 cm
Published by
Simon and Schuster / New York
$33.00 - Out of stock
Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Her range of sensitivity—moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual— is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would “set color free in three dimensions.” She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters’ journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself—and her readers—through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art.
Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.
Introduction by Audrey Niffenegger
"A remarkable record of a woman's reconciliation of art, motherhood, memoires of childhood, and present-day demands." — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Daybook is a rare gift, illuminating and nourishing, a journal to read and re-read." — May Sarton
"A natural and graceful writer... Truitt's self-examination is unflinching and, at every moment, possessed of the inevitable dignity that attends a genuine commitment to telling the truth about oneself." — Art in America
2020, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
Originally published in French in 1979, Rogomelec was the third of Leonor Fini’s novels. All the qualities of the paintings for which she is famed can be found in it: an undermining of patriarchy, the ambiguities of gender and the slipperiness of desire, along with darker hints of cruelty and the voluptuousness of fear. This novella’s ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec—where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers—and moves through a waking dream involving strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary, and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the “the celebration of the king” is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec’s Gothic ruins. This first English translation includes 14 drawings by Fini that accompanied the novella’s original publication.
Translated by William Kulik and Serena Shanken Skwersky, with an introduction by Jonathan P. Eburne
Born in Argentina and raised in Italy, Leonor Fini (1907–1996), concluded a rebellious youth with a move to Paris and a career in painting. Her six decades of work as artist, illustrator, designer, and author bore close ties to the Surrealist movement, but though the Surrealists saw her as one of them, she herself never identified as a Surrealist. Rejecting the role of muse, her work focused on portrayals of women as subjects with desire as opposed to objects of desire, and was groundbreaking in its explorations of mythology, androgyny, death, and life as Mannerist theater.
2019, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
$38.00 - Out of stock
This beautiful brochure was published on the occasion of the exhibition Otto Meyer-Amden “Vorbereitung” at Galerie Buchholz New York, in 2019, and contains a new essay by Dieter Schwarz, alongside colour plates of all exhibited works. This is the English edition.
Otto Meyer-Amden (Born Otto Meyer, February 20, 1885, Bern - January 15, 1933, Zürich) was a Swiss painter and graphic artist.
2019, English
Softcover, 42 pages, 24.8 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
$40.00 - Out of stock
Secret Passage 6: Bonnard, Villiegle, Twomboy, WSB, FBess, Hatchet Kai, Picabia, thirst trapgedies, all some young dudes, religious conversion therapy, Moreau, Teenage Moster Makeup, I touched up a Martha Rosler, TFaulk update, yetceterea
Self-published 2019 by richard hawkins and Galerie Buchholz
2018, English
Softcover, 38 pages, 24.8 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
$40.00 - Out of stock
Secret Passage IV:
Burroughs in Blueboy, Auden in FUCK YOU magazine (ca. 1963),
noted G4$ misfortunes, Harold Norse collages (date),
“Delectable Parts” & misc. pictorial embelandishments
Self-published 2018 richard hawkins & Galerie Buchholz
2018, English
Softcover, 22 pages, 24.8 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Galerie Buchholz / Köln
$40.00 - In stock -
matt dillon, michael jackson's bedroom, various freeway killers, blueboy magazine, heartthrobs and Wm S Burroughs.... SECRET PASSAGE #2 by artist Richard Hawkins is "an assembly of found images d'loaded from alt.binaries.pictures.teenidols in 1998 & which incorporate all the artist's dreamy teenage pleasures, cringing inevitabilities & fore-doomed eventualities circa 1979"
Self-published 2018 richard hawkins & Galerie Buchholz
2019, English
Poster (double-sided, folded) in envelope, 59.5 x 63 cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
$30.00 - In stock -
Limited edition poster with the transcript of Rainald Goetz’s presentation of the English translation of his novel Insane, published on the occasion of the exhibition opening for the group exhibition Hölle in September 2018 at Galerie Buchholz New York, featuring new or selected works by Lutz Bacher, Caleb Considine, Vincent Fecteau, Rainald Goetz, Sergej Jensen, Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, Monica Majoli, Albert Oehlen, Henrik Olesen, and Heji Shin.
Rainald Maria Goetz (b. 1954) is a German author, playwright and essayist.
2022, English
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 108 pages, 26 x 30 cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
Art & Theory / Stockholm
$85.00 - Out of stock
The first monograph on the artist Ulla Wiggen. This comprehensive catalogue contains new texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Peter Cornell, Sabeth Buchmann, and Caleb Considine. The publication reproduces nearly all of the artist’s paintings since 1963.
Ulla Wiggen (b. 1942) is a Swedish painter. Wiggen is known for her paintings that interpret electronic circuitry, integrated circuit dies and schematic diagrams. She explored this world when hardly anyone could predict how digital technology would revolutionize our daily lives. In 1966, she participated in the performances 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering in New York assisting Öyvind Fahlström, whose radical view of art was of great importance to her. In the late 1960s she was also known for her human figure paintings. She also became a licensed psychotherapist, which became her primary vocation until 2013 when she, after an exhibition with her previous paintings at the Moderna Museet, decided to resume her artworks after 30 years break. Since then, her focus on the computer's interior and the human exterior has shifted to the inside of the human body and increasingly focused on the brain and iris of the eye.