World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1969, English / German
Flexible plastic covers, screw-bound in acrylic spine, multiple stocks throughout, approx 500 pages, 28 x 15 cm
3rd enlarged edition,
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
$300.00 - Out of stock
The extraordinary, definitive 1960s art exhibition catalogue, in it's 3rd expanded and corrected edition, designed by Wolf Vostell for the Ludwig collection in Cologne in 1969. A work of art itself, "Kunst der sechziger Jahre" perfectly embodies the materiality of the pop-era in book form. Housed in thick blind-stamped clear soft plastic covers bound in a hard acrylic plexiglass spine with stainless steel screws, this remarkable book opens with an introductory text and lexicon in German and English, printed on styrofoam pages and graph stock, with contributions by Gert von der Osten, Peter Ludwig, Horst Keller, and Evelyn Weiss. Featuring 92 artists, all part of the private collection of Peter Ludwig, each artist is presented with a portrait on transparent acetate followed by a selection of glossy offset-printed colour artworks tipped-in (often concertina fold-out!) on thick raw kraft paper pages. This enlarged 3rd edition features over 200 objects in total, a vast expansion on the first editions.
Featuring the greats of European-American Pop, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Art Informel, Abstraction, Minimalism and more, this mighty tome includes the work of Josef Albers, Carl Andre, Horst Antes, Shusaku Arakawa, Allan D'Arcangelo, Arman, Richard Artschwager, Jo Baer, Larry Bell, Miguel Berrocal, Joseph Beuys, Peter Blake, Gernot Bubenik, Anthony Caro, John Chamberlain, Dan Christensen, Alex Colville, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ronald Davis, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Richard Estes, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Dan Flavin, Lucio Fontana, Domenico Gnoli, Bruno Goller, Robert Graham, Nancy Stevenson Graves, Gunter Haese, Richard Hamilton, Hans Hartung, Erwin Heerich, Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Allen Jones, Donald Judd, Howard Kantovitz, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Kienholz, R. B. Kitaj, Konrad Klapheck, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Linder, Morris Louis, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Marisol, Malcolm Morley, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Gerhard Richter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, James Rosenquist, Niki de Saint Phalle, Nicolas Schoffer, Bernhard Schultze, George Segal, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Spoerri, Lawrence Stafford, Lewis Stein, Frank Stella, Antoni Tapies, Paul Thek, Wayne Thiebaud, Jean Tinguely, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Gunther Uecker, Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), Victor Vasarely, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Wols (Wolfgang Schulze).
A Very Good copy of this fragile and collectible catalogue. The usual bowing to pages, some general ageing, with a split to the lower back of plastic spine where the screw hole is, yet all still intact, nothing missing. Complete copy.
2009, English
Softcover (w. plastic dust jacket and 15 artist postcards), 200 pages, 33 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis / Missouri
$300.00 - Out of stock
Our story begins in Ancient Greece with Socrates announcing, “I know that I know nothing.” Clearly, confusion has always been at the heart of wisdom.
Curated by Anthony Huberman at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2009, the group exhibition and catalogue For the Blind Man in the Dark Room Looking for the Black Cat That Isn't There explores the speculative nature of knowledge and insists on the importance of curiosity and the things we don't understand. Arranged around the premise that the world—and art—is not a code that needs cracking, the works in the exhibition center on the fruitfulness of not-knowing, un-learning, and productive confusion. David Hullfish Bailey, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Fischli & Weiss, Rachel Harrison, Giorgio Morandi, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Frances Stark, Rosemarie Trockel and others present explanations that playfully don't explain. Dedicated to the inquisitive mind, For The Blind Man celebrates our ability to get lost and the stories we use to find our way in the dark. The book is edited, arranged and designed by London-based writer Will Holder and includes a new essay by curator Anthony Huberman.
Featuring: Anonymous, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Marcel Broodthaers, Sarah Crowner, Mariana Castillo Deball, Eric Duyckaerts, Ayşe Erkmen, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Rachel Harrison, Giorgio Morandi, Matt Mullican, Bruno Munari, Nashashibi/Skaer, Falke Pisano, Jimmy Raskin, Frances Stark, Rosemarie Trockel, Patrick van Caeckenbergh, and David William.
Rare first edition of this incredible catalogue, over-sized and complete in plastic jacket and original issue 15 large artist postcards included. Very Good—Fine copy with some light tanning only.
2020, English
Hardcover, 287 pages, 19 x 29 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
ICA / Pennsylvania
$140.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of this quickly out-of-print monograph. Celebrations of sentiment, wit and thought: an overview on the beloved and influential American postminimalist Ree Morton.
This volume accompanies the first major United States exhibition of artist Ree Morton (1936–77) in nearly four decades. Edited by Kate Kraczon. Foreword by Amy Sadao. Text by Nayland Blake, Roksana Filipowska, Abi Shapiro.
During a brief but incredibly prolific career, Morton produced installations, sculptures and drawings rich in emotion and philosophically complex, that celebrated tropes of love, friendship and motherhood, radically asserting sentiment as a legitimate subject of artmaking. Her inclusion of personal narrative—through literary, theoretical and autobiographical references—and use of bold color and theatrical imagery infused her objects with sly humor and decorative energy, generating a feminist legacy increasingly appreciated in retrospect.
Long celebrated by peers and younger generations, Morton’s influence on contemporary art remains considerable yet widely under-recognized.
As New but damages from the factory - a crush to the front hardcover edge and bumping to top corner towards back of book, light edge wear to hardcovers. Otherwise Very Good, unread copy.
1972 / 1984, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
British Broadcasting Corp. / London
$18.00 - Out of stock
'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'
'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.
John Peter Berger (1926 – 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently and moved to a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.
'Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of professional art critics ... he is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation'—Peter Fuller, Arts Review
'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time'—Observer
VG copy of 1972 ed, 1984 print.
2003, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 19 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Abaton Book Company / New York
JRP Editions / Zürich
$300.00 - Out of stock
Very rare and collectible artists' book / punk anthology of texts by New York painter Steven Parrino, edited by Lionel Bovier and issued in a single edition in 2003 by JRP Editions and Abaton Book Company in New York. Includes artworks.
Parrino “came to painting at the time of its death, not to breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness.”
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was an American artist and musician associated with energetic punk nihilism. Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. As early as 1981 he began creating large monochrome paintings that he violently slashed, tore or twisted off their stretchers, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting. Parrino also played electric guitar in several downtown bands, including Electrophilia, a two-person group he formed with the painter and keyboardist Jutta Koether. Parrino died in a motorcycle accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
Fine copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Centre d'editions / Melbourne
Guzzler / Rosanna
$30.00 - In stock -
Very limited edition informal magazine/catalogue published on the occasion of ‘Sex is Gay: Part Deux’, a group exhibition presented by Zac Segbedzi at Guzzler, Rosanna, 20 Nov — 5 Dec, 2021. Features the work of Ramsay Alderson, Richard Hawkins, Paul Levack, Mathieu Malouf, Heji Shin, and Alex Vivian. Lavishly colour illustrated on glossy stock with work images, video stills and installation photography from the exhibition, followed by 20 pages of erotic photos shot by Ramsey Alderson and Richard Hawkins of famed pornstar Tom Faulk during Mathieu Malouf's 2016 show ‘Toilet’ at Jenny's in Los Angeles.
Very limited print run.
2018, English / Spanish
Softcover, 370 pages, 20.3 x 25.1 cm
Published by
Kelsey Street Press / US
$82.00 - Out of stock
New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other. In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.
Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker. The author of twenty poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., she performs and exhibits her work widely. A precursor of conceptual, impermanent art and the improvisatory oral performance, her work deals with the interactions between language, earth and textiles. Her recent books are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Kelsey Street Press, 2018), SPIT TEMPLE: THE SELECTED PERFORMANCES OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Chanccani Quipu, a new artist book by Granary Books, and SABORAMI (ChainLinks, 2011). She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009). Since 1980 she divides her time between Chile and New York.
2019, English
Softcover, 66 pages, 21 x 18 cm
Published by
Stuart Shave Modern Art / London
$42.00 $30.00 - In stock -
Published on the occasion of Julien Nguyen’s solo exhibition at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (18 May – 30 June 2018), this catalogue illustrates the ten works in the exhibition in addition to twelve further paintings produced between 2013 and 2017. The setting for Julien Nguyen’s new body of work is Biblical; each painting is composed through readymade scenes in which archetypal characters pose in some of the most archetypical scriptural tableaux. Mary’s annunciation, or the flagellation, baptism, and resurrection of Christ; these are some of the narrated events that seamlessly merge with an art-historical framework of 15th century painting’s perspectival studies of figures in space. But despite the fact that scenes of Nguyen’s paintings are often traceable to these canonical references, his subjects themselves are distinctively of their own time. The relationship between these images and their objects is one of incarnation over iconography. Their spectators attentive, rather than absorbed. Perhaps most distinctively, included in his subjects, are the faces of the artist’s own passions — social inhabitants in a contemporary Los Angeles and loved ones playing God.
Introduction by Charlie Fox, texts by Jenny Borland and Hardy Hill.
2022, English
Hardcover, 188 pages, 28 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$99.00 - Out of stock
The immediately out-of-print first monograph on Los Angeles-based Swiss Uruguayan artist Jill Mulleady (born 1980).
Mulleady creates critically acclaimed paintings whose abiding mood suggests pent-up tensions between isolate figures in incongruously lush, sumptuously chromatic landscapes and domestic interiors. Recalling early modernist painters of intensely loaded psychic atmosphere such as Félix Vallotton and Edvard Munch, and perhaps informed by her training in theater, Mulleady's backdrops, rendered in her characteristic tones of gray, crimson and absinthe green, are generally invented, or may sometimes draw on the contours of her immediate environment, such as the parks of Los Angeles; her figures, meanwhile, seem lost in contemplation, alienated, even despairing at times. This beautifully produced volume presents the artist's paintings from 2015 to 2021, alongside texts by Julia Kunzi, Philipp Kaiser, John Kelsey, Valérie Knoll, and features a special cover design by Mulleady.
2022, English
Hardcover, 464 pages, 26.4 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$120.00 $70.00 - Out of stock
An opulent, joyful homage to the many ways of painting flowers, from Charles Burchfield to Amy Sillman.
“Flowers are always working in the service of the passage of time,” writes Helen Molesworth in the opening pages of (Nothing but) Flowers. “In all of the paintings in this book where flowers are depicted, innocently standing in their vases, the minor gestures of gathering, arranging and display can be seen as a verb list dedicated to world-building.” This clothbound volume gathers paintings of flowers by more than 50 artists from Charles Burchfield to Amy Sillman, Joe Brainard to Lisa Yuskavage, who have explored the perennial appeal of this richest and yet simplest of subjects. (Nothing but) Flowers demonstrates the capacity of the humble botanical motif to capture sorrow, stimulate rehabilitation, and guide us through periods of mourning, celebration and rebirth. Writers Hilton Als, Helen Molesworth and David Rimanelli contribute meditations on the many resonances of flowers in art.
Artists include: Gertrude Abercrombie, Marina Adams, Henni Alftan, Ed Baynard, Nell Blaine, Dike Blair, Vern Blosum, Joe Brainard, Cecily Brown, Charles Burchfield, Matt Connors, Andrew Cranston, Ann Craven, Stephanie Crawford, Somaya Critchlow, Verne Dawson, Lois Dodd, Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, Ida Ekblad, Minnie Evans, Marley Freeman, Jane Freilicher, Mark Grotjahn, James Harrison, Lubaina Himid, Samuel Hindolo, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Max Jansons, Ernst Yohji Jaeger, Sanya Kantarovsky, Alex Katz, Karen Kilimnik, Zenzaburo Kojima, Matvey Levenstein, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Calvin Marcus, Helen Marden, Jeanette Mundt, Soumya Netrabile, Woody De Othello, Sanou Oumar, Jennifer Packer, Nicolas Party, Hilary Pecis, Richard Pettibone, Elizabeth Peyton, Amy Sillman, Elaine Sturtevant, Tabboo!, Honor Titus, Uman, Susan Jane Walp, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, Matthew Wong, Albert York, Manoucher Yektai and Lisa Yuskavage.
1984, Japanese
Softcover, 96 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Vivant / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Issue 12 (1984) of Japan's great Art Vivant quarterly journal. This very special issue dedicated entirely to the work of Balthus (1908 – 2001). Heavily illustrated throughout with black and white reproductions of Balthus' drawings and etchings, along with a large colour section reproducing many of Balthus' paintings, also essays in Japanese, portraits, biography, and much more. Both front and back covers feature work by Balthus.
Very scarce and Very Good copy of this collectible issue.
Throughout his career, Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about, and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. A telegram sent to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B."
Balthus (1908 – 2001), was a Polish-French modern artist born in Paris to Polish expatriate parents. His given name was Balthasar Klossowski - his sobriquet "Balthus" was based on his childhood nickname, alternately spelled Baltus, Baltusz, Balthusz or Balthus. His father, Erich Klossowski, was an art historian who wrote a noted monograph on Daumier. His older brother was the philosopher and artist Pierre Klossowski. An unusual figure in the history of twentieth century painting, Balthus both traveled among and drew upon the work of other major artists of his time, while at the same time following a unique individual trajectory. He was mentored by, friends of, and/or even collaborated with seminal creative figures from different eras, including Antonin Artaud, André Breton, and Rainer Maria Rilke, while cultivating his own highly refined style of dreamlike, classically-informed painting. The scenes he usually depicted were very ordinary bourgeois interiors or outdoor settings, which nonetheless managed to reveal the heightened inner states of his subjects as well as the states of mind of those who might be viewing them.
"I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always with a slight touch of mystery in my paintings." - Balthus
Good-Very Good copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 22 x 15 cm
Published by
Caesura / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
Caesura (seh-'zhur-uh) is a magazine of art and criticism. This inaugural issue of Caesura looks back on Surrealism not as an answer to the current crisis of art, but as one of the last movements to raise it as a question for life. The legacy of Surrealism is undoubtedly problematic: its novel techniques and strange effects have been repeatedly hypostatized and deployed in the production, both high and low, of culture industry kitsch. Still something remains of its original drive: to pierce the veil of appearance for a glimpse at the underlying forms that constitute subjective experience. For the concrete, as Marx says, “is concrete by virtue of being the concentration of many determinations.” Surrealism — more real than reality itself.
Featuring work by Will Alexander, Gabriel Almeida, Dato Barbakadze, Roberta Boffo, Roberto Calasso, Austin Carder, Mary Ann Caws, Billie Chernicoff, Róbert Gál, Allison Hewitt Ward, Robert Kelly, Timothy Kelly, Carlos Lara, Juliette Neil, Joel Newberger, Tamas Panitz, Andrei Pokrovskii, Irakli Qolbaia, Alice Paalen Rahon, Laurie Rojas, Kira Scerbin, Bret Schneider, David Short, Rosmarie Waldrop, Madison Winston, Patrick Zapien, and Maggie Louisa Zavgren.
COVER: Kira Screbin, Triple Breather, 2019
DESIGN: Renata Cruz Lara
About Caesura:
The alarm bells are ringing and catastrophe is at the door. As the last century begins its final exit from the stage, what will happen to the experience it gave humanity? Will this experience survive the world that bore it? Not only common sense but the stars themselves are realigning in an effort to forget the objects of our shattered dreams, shedding them as empty husks of strange, unpleasant times. What shines true today in light of yesterday will not be counted on tomorrow. Only those who learn to brush against the flow of time will have any chance of staying afloat. Thus the sun that we see setting is not the same that will be rising, and everything — all that is holy and all profane — shall be transfigured in the course of night. Art too must stake its place in the world that will dawn in the approaching epoch.
Contemporary art, which has dominated artistic practice for fifty years or more, adheres to a concept of the contemporary which obliterates the shape of history and demands the strictest currency as the criterion of art’s success. Like fashion, it has come to be distinguished by the marvelous arbitrary ascents and subsequent ridiculous falls that churn and cycle through art’s fortune, trend after trend, season after season. Each and every moment is compelled to find its style and is extinguished in a bright and empty glimmer that leaves one wondering, much like Gauguin long ago: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The academic theory proffered in the schools, journals, galleries, and museums that educate young artists and critics today mistrusts — and oftentimes condemns! — such basic, searching questions about the meaning and purpose of art. More often than not, the theorists and critics of contemporary art regret the fact that artworks strive towards a freedom which seems unforgivably barbaric when so many continue to suffer. But such a ‘critical’ perspective gradually grows indifferent to those images of future happiness which permeate artworks that grasp towards something truly new and different in creation. Thus the history of art has come to give form to the history of the species — to the irresistible rhythm of self-creation and self-destruction that constantly drives humanity to a world beyond its own.
Caesura is a modest project to collect the scattered fragments of art and criticism working to escape the aimlessness that plagues the present. What is necessary is a break, a pause, and some room to breathe. We are looking to publish visual art, poetry, prose, and music as well as fundamental criticism and commentary from artists and writers that recognize the task before us and the need for something new. We have no schemas or positive ideals to enshrine, nor do we endorse particular styles, techniques, or media. What we have to offer is a sense of history, of the dead-end of the present, and the disappointment of the past: “a total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.” What we ask is simply that art prove its right to exist. //
“IT IS SELF-EVIDENT THAT NOTHING CONCERNING ART IS SELF-EVIDENT ANYMORE, NOT ITS INNER LIFE, NOT ITS RELATION TO THE WORLD, NOT EVEN ITS RIGHT TO EXIST.”—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
2017, German / English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 30 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$45.00 - Out of stock
The eighth instalment in Kunstverein München’s ‘Companion’ series, this “Verkaufskatalog” contains images, prices, material descriptions, and gallery designations for each of the works by artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys included in the exhibition ‘30 Jahre Kunst’. The diverse spectrum of the duo’s collaborative practice – drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, kinetic objects, and videos – is represented over the book’s 192 pages, all printed in black and white. In addition, a number of lost, destroyed, or forgotten works are featured, as well as new works that were specially commissioned for the exhibition.
Highly recommended.
2021, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Camden Art Centre / UK
$98.00 - Out of stock
Humanity’s place in the natural order is under scrutiny as never before, held in a precarious balance between visible and invisible forces: from the microscopic threat of a virus to the monumental power of climate change.
Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, The Botanical Mind investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree was conceived as a trans-generational group exhibition by Gina Buenfeld and Matt Williams for the Camden Art Centre, bringing together surrealist, modernist, visionary, outsider, indigenous Amazonian, and contemporary works alongside historical and ethnographic artefacts, textiles and manuscripts spanning more than 500 years. Through the symbolism of diverse cultural artefacts and the works of mystics, artists and thinkers around the world, 'The Botanical Mind' reveals how the vegetal kingdom has metaphysical importance to the development of consciousness and spirituality.
This richly illustrated 224-page companion publication includes essays by the curators and contributions from scholars on the key themes of the exhibition – alchemy, art history, plant ontology, Gaian ecology, anthropology and ethnobotany – unifying philosophical, scientific, spiritual and artistic approaches to meditate on the cosmic significance of plants in different worldviews.
Edited by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark
Designed by Sara De Bondt studio.
Artists and Writers
Eileen Agar / Anni Albers / Josef Albers / Sarah Angliss / Consuelo "Chelo" González Amézcua / Gemma Anderson with Wakefield Lab and John Dupré / Anna Atkins / Kirk Barley / Jordan Belson / Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater / Karl Blossfeldt / Carol Bove / Jagadish Chandra Bose / Kerstin Brätsch / Bernd Brabec De Mori / Hildegarde von Bingen / Andrea Büttner / Adam Chodzko / Ithell Colquhoun / Bruce Conner / Brenda Danilowitz / Das Institut / Mirtha Dermisache / Minnie Evans / Cerith Wyn Evans / Charles Filiger / Robert Fludd / Monica Gagliano / Giorgio Griffa / Brion Gysin / Friedrich Wilhelm Heine / Ernst Haeckel / Dr Stephan Harding / Anna Haskel / Tamara Henderson / Channa Horwitz / Textiles from the Huni Kuin (Kaxinawa) people / C.G. Jung / Joachim Koester / Rachid Koraïchi / Hilma af Klint / Emma Kunz / Yves Laloy / Ghislaine Leung / Linder / Simon Ling / Michael Marder / Agnes Martin / André Masson / John McCracken / Terence McKenna / Henri Michaux / Matt Mullican / Wolfgang Paalen / Paul Păun / Stefan A. Pedersen / Santiago Ramón y Cajal / Steve Reinke and James Richards / Edith Rimmington / Adele Röder / Daniel Rios Rodriguez / Rupert Sheldrake / Textiles and ceramics from the Shipibo-Conibo people / Penny Slinger / F. Percy Smith / Janet Sobel / Philip Taaffe / Priscilla Telmon and Vincent Moon / Fred Tomaselli / Delfina Muñoz de Toro / Alexander Tovborg / David Tudor / Lee Ufan / Scottie Wilson / Terry Winters / Adolf Wölfli / Bryan Wynter / Henriette Zéphir / Anna Zemánková / Unica Zürn / artists from the Yawanawá community
1992, English
Softcover, 8 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm folded, 42 x 29.7 cm unfolded
1st edition, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
City Gallery / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
An Interview with Ashley Crawford
John Nixon is an Australian artist born in 1949, his Experimental Painting Workshop EPW – founded in 1990 – is not a physical workshop but an intellectual as well as a practical visual investigation into non-representational painting.
1986, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 20.5 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$140.00 - Out of stock
"Recession Art & Other Strategies presents a selection of work by Robert MacPherson, Peter Tyndall, Gunter Christmann, Peter Cripps and John Nixon involving recessional techniques and strategies. The works span the period 1974 to 1985." - Peter Cripps
The wonderful and very scarce publication to accompany the exhibition "Recession Art & Other Strategies" at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 1986, curated by artist Peter Cripps. In our opinion, this is one of the finest Australian art exhibition catalogues ever made. Thoughtfully curated, beautifully designed and typeset, with photo documentation of works by the exhibiting artists and a great accompanying essay by curator and artist Peter Cripps. This text addresses and traces "a recurrence of a 'Recessional based' art practice in Australia". "The pressure of little money and a small art market has meant that many artists still own the greater part of their life's production. The initial difficulty of producing and the subsequent difficulty of disposing of art works is ever present...". Touching on Percy Grainger's 'Free Music' machines, to the recent histories of Australian exhibition spaces such Q Space, V Space, IMA, Q Space Annex, n-Space, and printed exhibition spaces such as Blunt Report, Hand Space, Pneumatic Drill, as well as projects such as The Fosterville Institute of Applied and Progressive Cultural Experience and The Anti-Music Collective, this text provides a clear insight into the many productions of these artists and their peers in Australia in the 1980's, as well as the climate that surrounded their activities.
Very Good copy.
1993, English / German
Softcover, 36 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Künstlerhaus Bethanien / Berlin
$30.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful early catalogue of an exhibition held at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Nov. 27-Dec. 13, 1993 by Australian artists Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley. Illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with essay in English and German by Rex Butler.
As New copy.
1996, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Artspace / Sydney
David Pestorius / Brisbane
Experimental Art Foundation / Adelaide
$25.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the traveling exhibition Gail Hastings — To Make a Work of Timeless Art, at Artspace, Sydney; Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; David Pestorius Gallery, Brisbane, 1996. Illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with essay by Linda Michael. Published in an edition of 600 copies.
Australian abstract artist Gail Hastings makes work which she describes as 'sculptuation': a combination of sculpture and situation. Her work is a conversation about space and objects, and about the ideas that arise through their interaction and in different situations.
Very Good copy.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 264 pages, 24 x 28 cm
Published by
Skira / Milan
$60.00 - Out of stock
A leading light of the Art Informel generation that also included Tàpies and Dubuffet, Alberto Burri (1915-95) continues to exert a huge influence on artists today, as the popularity of his 2015 Guggenheim show and the perpetual scarcity of Burri monographs attests. This volume—the most comprehensive book on the artist in print—explores the beauty and complexity of the creative process, "material poetry," that undergirded all of his work.
Burri worked with the most varied materials with an inexhaustible creative energy: tar, paper, fabric, jute sacks, combustions of plastic, wood and iron all found their way into his picture plane, transfiguring the vocabulary of painting for the postwar sensibility. The titles of Burri's various series convey this "material poetry": Gobbi (hunchbacks), Muffe (molds), Bianchi (whites), Legni (woods), Ferri (irons), Combustioni plastiche (plastic combustions), Cretti and Cellotex. This affordable volume introduces Burri's poetical vocabulary of materials for a new audience.
2015, English
Hardcover, 128 pages, 29 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Inventory Press / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
The much-revered avant-garde guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) incorporated influences ranging from folk, blues, and bluegrass to classical music, musique concrete, and noise in his primarily acoustic guitar-based compositions. Considered a legend by many, Fahey released upward of three dozen LPs in his lifetime.
Relatively late in life, Fahey extended his so-called American Primitive approach beyond music, and into the creation of a substantial body of paintings created in makeshift studios in and around Salem, Oregon. Painting on found poster board and discarded spiral notebook paper, working with tempera, acrylic, spray paint, and magic marker, Fahey’s intuitive approach echoes the action painters and abstract expressionists. The same alluring and tranquilizing aesthetics that defines much of Fahey’s musical output are equally present in his paintings.
The first publication focusing on his visual output, John Fahey: Paintings, edited in collaboration with Audio Visual Arts (AVA), is illustrated with 92 plates and is accompanied by essays from Keith Connolly, founding member of No-Neck Blues Band, and the critic Bob Nickas.
2022, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - In stock -
What is it like to make art the way the world is today? What is it to write about art? Every review you read in 2022 will attempt to answer these questions, whether it knows it or not. You can see it if you look hard enough. And in thinking about this we perhaps hold a candle to the darkness, or perhaps these questions are the light that allows us to see the darkness around us. Thank you for reading Memo lit by the world’s candlelight.
These are the reviews from 2021, the fourth year of Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
Featuring contributions by A. D. S. Donaldson, Adelle Mills, Amelia Winata, Amy May Stuart, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Babs Rapeport, Cameron Hurst, Chelsea Hopper, David Wlazlo, Diego Ramírez, Francis Plagne, Giles Fielke, Hilary Thurlow, Jarrod Zlatic, Léuli Eshrāghi, Luke Smythe, Matt Marasco, Michelle Guo, Miriam La Rosa, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler Sofia Skobeleva, Tara Heffernan, Tara Mcdowell, Timmah Ball, Ursula Cornelia De Leeuw, Victoria Perin, and Vincent Le.
1978, English
Softcover, 84 pages, 28.5 x 23 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bantam Books / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
1978 edition of the first major book published on the work of American fantasy and science fiction artist Frank Frazetta (1928 – 2010). Lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with Frazetta's incredible paintings and illustrations, this volume (first edition 1975) has become a collector's staple on the artist, leading to two follow-up collections. Often referred to as the "Godfather of fantasy art", and one of the most renowned illustrators of the 20th century, Frazetta is widely recognised for his artwork for comic books, science fiction book covers, paintings, posters, LP record album covers, and other media. Frazetta was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and was awarded a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
Introduction by Betty Ballantine.
Very Good copy with only minor wear/marks to cover.
1983, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 24 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Vermilion / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1983, The Blue Book compiles an amazing, diverse, all-colour collection of erotic fantasies through the eyes of over 100 of the world's most successful artists of the early 1980s, including Andy Warhol, Harumi Yamaguchi, Robert Bishop, Yosuke Ohnishi, Richard Bernstein, Carol Lay, Robert Blue, Lou Brooks, Robert Grossman, Mick Haggerty, George Hardie, Bush Hollyhead, Allen Jones, John Kacere, Katsu, Mel Odom, Neon Park, Gary Panter, Mel Ramos, Pater Sato, Todd Schorr, Tom Wesselmann, Tadanori Yokoo, George Stavrinos, Olivia, Nancy Kintisch and many more!
Very Good, crisp copy, well preserved.
2013, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 17.8 x 22.8 cm
Ed. of 800,
Published by
Galerie Buchholz / Köln
$90.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous book published on the occasion of the exhibition “Neptune Society, San Francisco Columbarium, 4th Fl., Dome Room, South Wall, Tier 4, Niche 2” organised by Danh Vo at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2012. Edited by Julie Ault, Heinz Peter Knes, Danh Vo, Christopher Müller & Daniel Buchholz.
In this exhibition and publication Danh Vo, Julie Ault and Heinz Peter Knes enter into a dialogue with the work of Martin Wong whose estate and collection was at the time (2012) stored and administered by Martin Wong’s mother Florence Wong Fie in the Wong family house in San Francisco.
Martin Wong (1946-1999) was born in Portland Oregon as the only son of Chinese immigrants Benjamin Fie and Florence Wong Fie. An important representative of the art scene in New York's lower East side in the 80s Martin Wong's house, as pictured in this publication, is a unique document of his life's work. In a variety of ways the contents of the house on the one hand reflects the wealth of reference in Martin Wong’s works, and over and above that the unique relationship between Martin Wong and his parents with all the necessarily complicated projections and possible misunderstandings such relationships entail.
This catalogue documents the collection of the artist Martin Wong. In numerous colour illustrations, photographs that Heinz Peter Knes took together with Danh Vo, the book depicts the interiors of the Wong Fie family residency in San Francisco filled with paintings, sculptures, and multifaceted objects from very specific and diverse fields of interest such as asian antiques and americana that Martin Wong followed and collected together with his parents throughout is life. Accompanied by a text by Julie Ault who recalls the congruity of Martin owning a Piet Mondrian and storing it "close to splashing water in his sixth-floor walk-up apartment in a run-down building on New York's pre-gentrification Lower East Side...".