World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1958, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 26 x 20 .5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$8.00 - Out of stock
The Quarterly Bulletin of the National Gallery of Victoria Vol. XII, No. 3, 1958. Works by Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Michael Shannon, Frank Hodgkinson, Lawrence Daws, Len Crawford, Russell Drysdale, Robert Dickerson, Justin O'Brien. Recent acquisitions and activities at the NGV, Melbourne. Good with wear, ageing, light marks.
1970, English
Softcover (stapled), 28 pages, 25 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Peter Stuyvesant Trust / Australia
$25.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published to accompany a touring exhibition of British Painting in the Peter Stuyvesant Trust in Australia. The exhibition toured across Adelaide, Perth, Launceston, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Newcastle, featuring the works of Ivon Hitchens, Ceri Richards, Francis Bacon, Victor Pasmore, Bryan Wynter, William Scott, Henry Mundy, Alan Davie, Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Heron, Tess Jaray, Leon Kossoff, Peter Sedgley, Bridget Riley, Anthony Hill, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, etc. Illustrated in colour and black and white throughout.
Good copy with only light handling/pitching.
2018, English
Hardcover, 136 pages, 29.5 × 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$220.00 - Out of stock
Robert Hunter was arguably Australia’s pre-eminent Minimalist painter. In 1968, at age twenty-one, he was the youngest artist represented in The Field, the inaugural and now-legendary exhibition at the new National Gallery of Victoria, which announced the arrival of late modernist abstraction in the Australian context. Hunter was also one of very few Australian artists to participate in an international art movement, exhibiting in Eight Contemporary Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974, and continuing to be involved in significant exhibitions in Australia and internationally throughout his career.
Published in an edition of only 500 copies and immediately out of print, this comprehensive publication, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversaries of The Field and Hunter’s first solo exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in 1968, surveys Hunter’s unswerving commitment to a singular aesthetic position, evident in his earliest white-on-white paintings through to the mature works for which he is best known. Heavily illustrated throughout, with essays by Jane Devery, Tom Nicholson, Ann Stephen and Jennifer Winkworth.
As New copy still in shrink wrap.
1996, German
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 312 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Haus der Kunst / Munich
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf / Düsseldorf
Cantz Verlag / Berlin
$220.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the best and still the most comprehensive book on Imi Knoebel, published in 1996 on the occasion of a major travelling retrospective exhibition in Munich, Amsterdam, Valencia, Dusseldorf, and Grenoble from 1996—1997.
Imi Knoebel (b. 1940) is one of the most important and consistent post-war German artists from the Beuys "school", known for his minimalist, abstract painting and sculpture, yet consciously eluding all interpretations and labels throughout his career. From 1962–64 he studied at the Darmstadt "Werkkunstschule", in a course based on the ideas of the pre-Bauhaus course taught by Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy. From 1964–1971, he studied under Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with fellow students Blinky Palermo (with whom he shared a studio and collaborated), Jörg Immendorff, Ivo Ringe and Katharina Sieverding. Viewing himself primarily as a painter, Knoebel's work explores the relationship between space, picture support and color. Utilising painterly means such as colour, brush stroke, canvas, panel and other carriers for the paint, worked and unworked surfaces, and constructions to shape the surfaces. At the same time, sculptural volume, plays a prominent role. He shows flat, unworked sheets of hardboard, or stretchers for canvasses, in piles, moving between disciplines and binding together the two- and three-dimensional. The style and formal concerns of his painting and sculpture have drawn comparisons with the high modernist principles of both Kazimir Malevich and the Bauhaus.
This lavishly illustrated monograph shows all work phases from Knoebel's career to-date, including stunning work and installation documentation, alongside many drawings, accompanied by texts (in German) from Rudi Fuchs, Max Wechsler, Johannes Stüttgen, Hubertus Gassner, Marja Bloem and Carmen Knoebel, a detailed bibliography and a biography, including so many original citations. This beautiful book an important resource on the work of an artist who, in his rigorous attitude, has remained pure, but at the same time poetic, as the touching "Kinderstern" from 1988 exemplarily shows.
Fine copy of this now long out of print book.
1971, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 12 pages, 25 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Specialty Press Ltd. / Melbourne
$45.00 - Out of stock
Published in approximately 1971 by The Specialty Press Ltd., this scarce glossy colour booklet catalogues the Art collection of Melbourne's BHP House in the early 1970's. Features the work of Australian painters John Coburn, David Aspden, Fred Williams, Asher Bilu, Sydney Ball, Martin Collocott, W. Delafield-Cook, John Olsen, Lawrence Daws, Louis James, Stanislaus Rapotec, Ian Chandler, Jeremy Barrett, Col Jordan, Robert Boynes, Stephen Earle, Clifton Pugh, Albert Tucker, Jeremy Gordon, Alun Leach-Jones, Michael Shannon, plus a full catalogue of their paintings and prints at that time.
1982, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 21.5 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
$20.00 - In stock -
"To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled." — Don DeLillo
These are the artists who put the load-bearing post in postmodern, making the visual politics of media, marketplace and patriarchy the crucial issues for the 1980s: Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Bogosian, Nancy Dwyer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman. A Fatal Attraction brought these and other artists who share these concerns together at a seminal point in this movement. This exhibition catalogue is a valuable reference for scholarship of this period of contemporary art, not to mention a cultural relic from an important moment in recent art history. Tom Lawson's essay links the artists within a set of shared concerns-deconstruction of institutionalized pleasure, demystification of representation-that follow from the discourse of 1960s and 70s conceptual art, but takes this critique of ideology from the insulated art world out into the streets and living rooms of America.
2013, English / French
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 256 pages, 21 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Black Jack Editions / France
$69.00 - Out of stock
First anthology of Rosemarie Trockel's collages, which are a key for a difracted and non-academic view on the whole work of this German artist known internationaly.
Rosemarie Trockel's collages form an important and central component of the retrospective exhibitions “Flagrant Delight”, held in 2012-2013 at Wiels (Brussels), Culturgest (Lisbon) and Museion (Bolzano), and “Verflüssigung der Mutter” (Deliquescence of the Mother), at the Kunsthalle Zurich in 2010. These collages are the subject of this publication, which takes a more detailed and in-depth look at them through a comprehensive body of illustrations of the 100 or so collages Trockel has produced to date, together with commissioned essays that address specifically this (still relatively unexplored) aspect of her extensive and multifaceted work.
Texts by Brigid Doherty, Gregory Williams, Elvan Zabunyan.
1984 / 2002, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 27.5 x 21 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$45.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
The groundbreaking 1984 book, Subway Art, photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant documenting the work of graffiti writers who illegally painted subway cars in New York City. Exploding with incredible vivid colour reproductions, Henry Chalfant's stunning train images capture some of the most innovative and iconic pieces from the period, with top-to-bottom whole car shots, panels, pull-out spreads, tags, interiors, details, and action shots, and Martha Cooper's narrative pictures tell the story — an introduction for the uninitiated to the NYC crews and writers, vocab, styles, et al, with loads of portraits and quotes from the writers. Includes the work of Iz The Wiz, Quik, Dondi, Zephyr, Noc, Futura 2000, Lady Pink, T-Kid, Lee, Crash, Blade, Daze, Lady Heart, Seen, Kase 2, Smily, Phase 2, Mitch, Skeme, Duro, Shy 147, and many others. This long out-of-print 2002 reprint retains the original design in facsimile, unlike the newer, reduced, re-designed/edited editions.
Very Good - Fine copy.
2001, English / Japanese
Hardcover (cloth), 2 volumes in slipcase, 325 & 159 pages, 22 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Setagaya Art Museum / Japan
$190.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful, scarce 2-volume hardcover set surveying the entire career of Japanese modern sculptor and ikebana master Sōfū Teshigahara (1900–1979), founder of the Sōgetsu-ryū school of ikebana flower arranging. Born in Tokyo, Teshigahara learned flower arranging from his father, and in 1927 Sōfū started the Sōgetsu School, becoming an internationally renowned leader in the field of flower arranging. He believed that ikebana is an art form, not merely decoration and that it is for the entire world, not just Japan alone. He believed the difference between the Sōgetsu School and other Ikebana lies in the understanding that once all the rules are learned and the techniques mastered, an unbounded field remains for freer personal expression using diverse and varied materials, not just flowers. In addition to ikebana, he created many various sculptures in scrap metal, wood and other materials, drawings, paintings and works of calligraphy throughout his entire life. Between 1950 and 1970, he held exhibitions and demonstrations across Europe and the United States.
Published on the occasion of the largest exhibition held on the work of Sōfū Teshigahara at the Setagaya Art Museum in 2001, this heavily-illustrated 2-volume catalogue contains full documentation of the exhibition, in-depth illustrated biography, chronology, history of exhibitions, and a comprehensive survey of Sofu’s works and exhibitions interwoven with valuable related materials, photographs, and documents that tell the story Teshigahara and his connections with many other leading artists, writers and artistic movements of the period (spanning Cubism, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Fluxus, Expressionism), including associations with Michel Tapié, Salvador Dalí, Isamu Noguchi, Fernand Léger, Ichiro Fukuzawa, Andy Warhol, and many others. Alongside so many of his incredible works, this fantastic publication gives a glimpse of the unique spirit of the turbulent times when Sōfū, an extraordinary expressionist, lived.
Fine copy.
2000, German
Softcover, 140 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
b_books / Berlin
$55.00 - Out of stock
Scarce early artist's book (10 years is not a fat pig) by German painter Michaela Eichwald, featuring writings and artworks by the artist Michaela Eichwald from the period of 1989-1999, with a preface by fellow artist Kai Althoff.
"A book that belongs in every household." FAZ
2020, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 25 x 30 cm
Published by
Archive Books / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
Ian Kiaer's new monograph is based on a project that the artist began several years ago and whose configuration changes with the circumstances. Drawing on the notion of marginal endnotes in books, it references the utopian concepts of the Austrian American architect Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965).
In the late 1940s, Kiesler—an atypical figure whose writings were a significant influence on postwar art, architecture and design—came up with the (unrealised) Tooth House, a residence modelled on the human tooth and integrated into its environment.
Guided by his reading of art history and architecture, and by the structural concerns underlying his own ideas, Kiaer has been developing an approach to painting as a "minor form". Each of his installations has a title linking it to a thinker, architect, philosopher or utopianist, with everyday objects and found materials assembled in such a way as to raise the question of their use and their appearance.
Here he continues his explorations of modernist architectural styles, taking as his cornerstone the Monsanto panoramic restaurant overlooking Lisbon, built by the architect Chaves da Costa in 1968. Intended as the embodiment of modernity, luxury and power as seen by Portugal's "New State" dictatorship (1933-1974), the building is now abandoned and as a ruin continues to ask questions of its history, politics and present position as a critical monument.
Published as part of the the eponymous exhibition at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2017.
Ian Kiaer (born 1971 in London) produces fragile installations involving various architectural models, intact or slightly altered found objects and two-dimensional works to create fragmented narratives. His installations often function as projects or proposals, challenging notions of totality and permanence.
Venues for past solo exhibitions include the Neubaeur Collegium in Chicago, Lulu in Mexico City, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, the Aspen Art Museum, Kunstverein Munich and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. He has also taken part in group shows at Kunstshalle Berlin, MUDAM Luxembourg, the Rennes Biennial, Tate Britain, the British Art Show, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the 10th Lyon Biennial.
2021, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - In stock -
Hilma af Klint’s Catalogue Raisonné, the fourth of seven volumes, about one of Sweden’s most fascinating collections of artistic output.
Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint’s works, some 1,600 in all, have been collected in a Catalogue Raisonné. Af Klint’s work should be seen and appreciated in the series of paintings often depicting specific themes and this ground-breaking publication, divided into seven volumes, allows for this. Volume IV, within the series Parsifal she explored her inward self through the journey of a boy and a girl and their various levels of consciousness. In her Atom series, af Klint explored the inner parts of our existence through what scientists then considered the smallest particles in the world.
Produced with the permission of the Hilma af Klint Foundation and featuring introductions by Daniel Birnbaum and Kurt Almqvist.
2021, English
Hardcover, 250 pages, 23 x 29 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited English translation of a pioneering account of af Klint’s oeuvre.
Text by Åke Fant. Translation by Ruth Urbom.
For the first time since its original publication in 1989, Åke Fant’s pioneering account of Hilma af Klint’s life and career is available to read in English. Following her training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and 20 subsequent years of painting, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began working with an abstract visual language in 1906. She then dedicated the rest of her life to her magnum opus, a series of large-scale abstract paintings intended to be exhibited as part of an immense spiritual temple. Af Klint drew upon contemporaneous occult sources to develop her work, such as Spiritualism and the writings of Theosophical writers Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, as well as Rudolf Steiner, who claimed to be clairvoyant. This edition supplements Åke Fant’s original text and curator Lars Nittve’s foreword with a new preface by Kurt Almqvist (President, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit). An updated timeline, full-color reproductions of af Klint’s art and a beautiful cloth binding further emphasize the momentousness of Fant’s work, which remains vital even in the light of subsequent research, at a time when interest in Hilma af Klint and her work has never been greater.
2020, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 14.6 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic.
Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.
After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.
1972, Japanese / French
Softcover, 180 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful and scarcely seen Japanese catalogue on the work of Argentine artist Leonor Fini. Profusely illustrated throughout with Fini's incredible (Surrealist) paintings and drawings from 1936-1972, in colour and black and white. Includes biography and artist's introduction by Fini in French. All other texts are in Japanese.
Leonor Fini (1907–1996), an Argentine painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women, is considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century and also one of the most misunderstood. Fini had no formal artistic training. Born in Buenos Aires, she travelled extensively from a young age, living in Milan and then moving to Paris in 1931-32 where she was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, becoming acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired much of her work, and also Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. She had her first one person show in Paris when she was twenty-five at a gallery directed by Christian Dior. Her work caught on fast and was included in the pivotal and groundbreaking Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the MOMA in 1936 while at the same time she had her first New York exhibition at the avant-garde Julien Levy Galley. Surrealist artists in France came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although she did not consider herself a surrealist, nor a part of any particular artistic movement. Fini preferred to stake her own claim on modernism with a vision that owes more to the farthest shores of her imagination than to any affiliation with art trends, schools or movements. The originality of her art as well as her intelligence, famous wit and charisma accorded her celebrity status in the Paris art world and beyond beginning in the late thirties. Her panache and glamour, once they found a place in the collective imagination of the time, turned her into a much-publicized fashion and feminist icon. Always controversial, with as many detractors as admirers, she lived and painted consummately on her own terms.
In Paris in 1939 she curated the inaugural exhibition of her friend Leo Castelli’s first gallery (of surrealist furniture) and shortly thereafter, just before the German occupation, she traveled with André and a new lover to Arcachon in the southwest of France to begin waiting out the war. She remained there for almost a year with Salvador and Gala Dali before moving to Monte Carlo where she met the young Italian diplomat, Stanislao Lepri who became one of the great and enduring loves of her life. As the war intensified she moved with Stanislao to Rome where she lived, worked and formed close friendships with Anna Magnani, Luchino Visconti and other leading figures of world of art and letters. After the Liberation of Paris in 1946 she returned there to live and work for the remainder of her life, exhibiting extensively around the world.
The predominant themes in Leonor Fini’s art are sexual tensions, mysteries and games. One of her favored subjects is the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male, and in many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx to which she felt a strong identification. She was also a renowned portraitist, and among her subjects were such friends as writers André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Genet, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas), such actresses as Anna Magnani and Suzanne Flon, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, film director Luchino Visconti and artists Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington.
Her genius for stage and screen design is evident in her numerous ground breaking theater decors with their elaborate conception, costumes and phantasmagorical masks. She designed for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palais de Crystal, and choreographer Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, as well as over seventy productions at theaters in Paris between 1946 and 1969. She had a unique talent for film design and created costumes for Fellini's 8 ½ as well as for Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire d'O.
The provocative and much-publicized life of Leonor Fini was pure theater. Her story is that of a hard-won struggle to forge her life as a woman artist in a man’s world and to invent herself on her own terms. It is the story of a woman possessing exceptional independence, a highly original vision and great personal magnetism who lived passionately through her art and friendships and in the process became a feminist role model.
2021, English / German
Softcover, 286 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
This June issue of Texte zur Kunst undertakes a wide-ranging inquiry into the figurative in art. The human body, and the figure more generally, is undoubtedly among the most widely depicted subjects in the history of art. Browsing the exhibition programs of museums and galleries today, one cannot fail to notice that figurative art and rhetoric are experiencing a renaissance. In cooperation with TzK’s publisher Isabelle Graw and artist Jutta Koether, the editors have conceived an issue that takes up figuration both literally – as the subject of figurative representation in painting, literature, performance, theater, and social media – and in the broader sense, as the materialization and apprehension of social phenomena. Traditional figure-ground relationships in painting are examined, as well as the mass-mediated production of the celebrity through identity politics and questions of representation in Black figuration.
Includes a conversation between editor Isabelle Graw and artist Kerry James Marshall, essays by art theoreticians Amelia Jones and Robert Slifkin, as well as writings by artists: “Figuring,” by Jutta Koether; an essay by Annette Weisser about Alina Szapocznikow; a text by Amy Sillman on Elizabeth Murray, curator Mahret Ifeoma Kupka in conversation with Bani Abidi, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Anta Helena Recke, plus reviews of Hal Foster's "Brutal Aesthetics : Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg", "Seth Siegelaub. : Better Read Than Dead. Writings and Interviews 1964–2013", exhibitions by Amelie von Wulffen, Lorraine O'Grady, Alice Neel, Loretta Fahrenholz, Michaela Eichwald, Rindon Johnson, Julie Mehretu, "Cybernetics of the Poor", and much more.
2021, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 64 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$29.00 - Out of stock
This book contains three case studies on very different artists, analyzing their work through their respective historical contexts: the writer Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and his seminal text on Jean Fautrier's "Hostage Paintings" from 1943; visual artist Jack Whitten's (1939-2018) Memorial Paintings and Banksy's notorious auction stunt Love is in the Bin from 2018.
In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist Isabelle Graw introduces the term “value reflection.” Rather than an objective quality, value reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them. She argues that an artwork can actually reflect on its value despite being defined by it. This book focuses on the artistic production of three individuals—writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack Whitten and Banksy—and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their work. Graw distinguishes between an explicit (Ponge), immanent (Whitten), and seemingly destructive (Banksy) approach to value.
Three Cases of Value Reflection extends the themes found in Graw’s seminal book High Price, in which she questioned the dichotomy between art and the market as well as the notion that market value is equal to artistic value. By carefully combining a contextual, sociohistorical approach with close readings of the work of each case study, Graw demonstrates how art-historical and theoretical ambitions can, and must, go hand in hand.
Isabelle Graw is the publisher of the journal Texte zur Kunst, which she cofounded with Stefan Germer (1958–1998) in 1990, and professor of art history and art theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Her previous books include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (2020), The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (2018), High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (2010), and Die bessere Hälfte: Künstlerinnen des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (2003). Graw lives in Berlin.
2019, English
Softcover, 184 Pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
New Documents / Los Angeles
$36.00 - Out of stock
The Halifax Conference presents a transcript of a conference held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design on October 5–6, 1970, transcribed and adapted by artist Craig Leonard. Organized by Seth Siegelaub, the Conference was conceived as a means of bringing about a “meeting of artists…[from] diverse art making experiences and art positions…in as general a situation as possible.” Infamously, the conference was held in the college’s boardroom, while students and other interested parties watched the proceedings on a video monitor in a separate space. The result was a conversation that devolved—technologically and ideologically—into a quasi-tragicomic farce, punctuated by remarkable moments of rupture initiated by activist resistance to the Conference from the outside and dissenting voices from within. Attendees at the Conference included Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Ronald Bladen, Daniel Buren, Gene Davis, Jan Dibbets, Al Held, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Murray, N.E.Thing Co. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter), Richard Serra, Richard Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, and Lawrence Weiner.
Edited by Jeff Khonsary
2001, French / Japanese
Hardcover, 174 pages, 25 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokyo Station Gallery / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful hardcover catalogue surveying the engravings of James Ensor, published to accompany a major travelling exhibition in Japan in 2001. Beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated throughout with 175 graphic works reproduced in crisp detail, alongside many other illustrations of Ensor's life and paintings, accompanying texts in French and Japanese, including text by Ensor himself, biography, bibliography, catalogue and portraits of the artist in Ostend. Contains a wealth of fine examples of Ensor's fantastic grotesque engravings in both their black line print form alongside their over-painted colour editions, many with additional related sketches and historical references. Highly recommended.
Very Good copy, perfectly preserved interior with only light wear to illustrated hardcover boards.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favoured increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as The Scandalized Masks (1883) and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colourful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colours, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. James Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wols, and many expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century.
2020, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 22.8 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi / Berlin
$52.00 - Out of stock
"I was about to send this to press when Covid-19 abruptly pulled us into a new age. Art made before the rupture suddenly looks different, flickering with new meanings and demeanings. My book seemed to shift colors in my hands.
Back in 2002, in the aftershocks of 9/11, I wrote Dispersion. That essay considered then-nascent networks as spaces for corporate exploitation and warfare, and imagined an art that might flourish in the cracks of the new system. The final sentence was, "It may be that we are standing at the beginning of something." We certainly were at the beginning of something, but whatever it was, that thing is now over. We find ourselves at a new threshold."
Conceived as a cryptograph to Seth Price’s 2020 exhibition of the same name at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi in late 2020, Dedicated to Life is a new publication of collected writings by PricE. Spanning prose poetry, memoir, drawing, performance transcription, diaristic indexing, and writings on art, the book’s sequence of reproduced and newly published writings, including fragments from the ruins of an abandoned Young Adult novel he wrote a few years ago, forms a fractured composite where verse and criticism both bolster and cast doubt upon one another, perched on the frontier of contemporary life with a lighthearted, yet trenchant erudition that borders on cultural anthropology.
"My heap of debris evoked a boom time that had been brutal, confused, and decorated with silly baubles. It felt like a personal, affectual prehistory of the Trump era, all jumbled up: my own art writings of the aughts, the authenticity-obsessed lifestyle consumerism of the 2010s, shamanism and spells, the continuous deferral of an effective left response to the crisis of neoliberalism, food and fashion and boutique hotels. I rummaged for excerpts, broke them into pieces, let them ferment and transform each other. Here they are, bits of texture from the time between September 11 and Covid-19."
Highly recommended.
Seth Price (born 1973 in East Jerusalem) is a New York-based multi-disciplinary post-conceptual artist. He lives and works in New York City.
2019, English
Hardcover, 248 pages, 26 x 30 cm
Published by
Hirmer / Münich
Phoenix Art Museum / Phoenix
$85.00 - Out of stock
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions and beliefs to exemplify emotional states.
This lavishly illustrated hardcover publication seeks to clarify the artist's significance and role within the cannon of American Modernism but also against the legacy of European abstraction. It contextualizes her work against her contemporaries, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and their distinct versions of American spiritual modernism. Pelton's highly symbolic paintings were inspired by religious sources ranging from Theosophy and Agni Yoga to the spiritual teachings of Dane Rudhyar and Will Levington Comfort. Over three decades she devoted herself to painting spiritual abstractions, which conveyed her "light message to the world."
2021, English
Hardback, 252 pages, 22.9 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$80.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawings.
Much of Joseph Elmer Yoakum's story comes from the artist himself-and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891-1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a "spiritual unfoldment"? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities.
With hundreds of beautiful colour reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist's work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography.
2001, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 25 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museum of American Folk Art / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
The first monographic study on Joseph E. Yoakum (1890-1972), an African American-Native American self-taught master. Profusely illustrated, Traveling the Rainbow is a fitting tribute to this fascinating, yet little-known creator of visionary landscapes. What emerges herein fits an adventure novel. Yoakum traveled the oceans on steamliners working in their boiler rooms. He rode America's railways as an inspector. With an elite team of African American troops in World War I, he toured Europe. On the road with the Ringling Brothers Circus he posted circus flyers. He spent a year in a psychiatric hospital. He was 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes, and he produced over 2,000 watercolour and pencil drawings during the last decade of his life, infused with the motion and energy of travel. Much of what he told about his life -- especially about his travels -- was thought to be invented, but here Derrel DePasse makes startling discoveries about the artist's landscapes and finds that much of his story of himself was grounded in fact. Part African American, part Native American, Yoakum drew on his dual background and conjured powerful forms of expression -- the blues and Native American symbolism -- to create dynamic cultural fusions.
This monograph remains the most comprehensive study on this great American artist, including a chronology, bibliography, list of collections, exhibition history, and index.
Very Good copy.
2019, English
Softcover, 600 pages, 26 x 31 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Haus der Kunst / Munich
$90.00 - Out of stock
English edition of the first major exhibition catalogue on Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007) since his death, this beautifully produced 600-page volume offers a thematic overview of more than four decades of the artist's work, with more than 120 iconic paintings. Published on the occasion of a major retrospective of the artist, curated by Ulrich Wilmes, at Haus der Kunst (Jörg Immendorff - For all Beloved in the World - September 14, 2018–January 27, 2019), this incredible book contains a foreword by Ulrich Wilmes and Manuel Borja-Villel; along with contributions by Okwui Enwezor, Johanna Adorjan, Ulf Jensen, Danièle Cohn, Harald Szeemann, Pamela Kort, and Feridun Zaimoglu.
Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007) cultivated his image as an artist and tough guy, but he also had a soft and thoughtful side that can be discovered in addition to his political sense of mission in the retrospective For all Beloved in the World. A painting of a baby with red skin and a bouquet of flowers from 1966 lends the exhibition its title. The work is part of a larger series that depicts babies of different origins, chubby and laughing, trimmed to simplicity, “as a symbol of love and peace,” as Immendorff explained.
In the mid-1960s, as a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the class of Joseph Beuys, Immendorff first slipped into the role of the agitator. The actions of the Lidl Academy, which he developed with his first wife Chris Reinicke, represent his desire to change the world, to rebel against—what he felt—the uninspired and uninspiring political policies in Germany. Intuition and creativity were to be liberated through action. "Lidl" is an artificial word created in the tradition of Dada.
Later, Immendorff became sympathetic to the ideas of the KPD (German Communist Party). For several years he worked as a secondary school teacher and developed a visual language in which word and image stood side by side on equal footing. His “Accountability Report” is a series of paintings marked by clear pedagogical and political messages.
It was not until the late 1970s that Immendorff (1945-2007) decided to dedicate himself completely to art. In 1976, he participated in the Venice Biennale; in 1977, he created his Café Deutschland series, inspired by Renato Guttuso’s Caffé Greco (1976), which Immendorff had seen in an exhibition in Cologne. In the Café Deutschland images, Immendorff explores the politics of his time—it was a period marked by the RAF and domestic conflicts on both sides of the Berlin Wall—and in which the reunification of the two Germanys seemed beyond the realm of reality. In gloomy, theatrical settings, Immendorff portrayed himself as a border crosser between East and West. In addition to the clear political motivation, the pictures also show Immendorff's view of the world, in which ideas—embodied by historical figures—are in dialogue with each other through space and time.
In 1998 Immendorff learned that he has ALS ( amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). His world became progressively darker and his work was increasingly directed inward. He worked until his death—in the end only with the help of assistants who, following his instructions, realized his ideas in the studio. This final work phase includes key pieces such as Last Self-portrait I - The Painting Calls (1998) or Untitled (2000) with the vanitas motif borrowed from Hans Baldung Grien of a runner balancing on two globes. The political and social message gradually disappeared from Immendorff’s late work.