World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2005, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. printed paper dust-jacket and exhibition ephemera), 112 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The National Museum of Art / Osaka
Ueno Royal Museum / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first edition copy of this fine Japanese Polke catalogue (with inserted collected exhibition ephemera). Published in 2005 to accompany the Sigmar Polke exhibition "Alice In Wonderland" held at the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo and the National Museum of Art in Osaka, this handsome catalogue features many full-colour reproductions of Polke's paintings and drawings throughout.
"This exhibition is composed mainly of works in the collection of the artist, so it might be described as an exhibition of "Polke by Polke." In it, we examine the artist's career through approximately 30 of his large-scale paintings, from his early masterworks Alice in Wonderland (1971), and representative pieces of the 1980s and 1990s to some of his most recent work."
Includes texts in English and Japanese by Polke, Peter-Klaus Schuster, Wataru Hayashi, and more, plus an interview with Polke, biography, bibliography, exhibition list and catalogue of works. Comes wrapped in printed kraft paper dust-jacket and this copy with inserted collected exhibition ephemera, including exhibition flyer.
Polke is a major contemporary German artist and one of the most noted painters in the world. Polke was born in Oels, Silesia, formerly an eastern part of German territory, in 1941. At age 12 he moved to West Germany. After studying at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, he began making paintings incorporating photographs and references to American pop art and he has continued to develop experimental methods. Paintings that show the raster dots used in printing became his trademark and he also produced paintings on printed fabric or transparent materials instead of canvas. With broad knowledge and penetrating observation, parody, irony, and a sense of humor, he has combined a wide variety of motifs from the everyday life of contemporary people, fairy tales, history, military events, myths, and alchemy. These groups of images arouse the imagination of viewers. They are both fascinating and enigmatic. He received the Gold Lion Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2002.
Very Good copy, preserved in plastic jacket, with fine ephemera enclosed.
2021, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 220 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - In stock -
Foreword by Daniel Birnbaum, Kurt Almqvist.
The drawings in this first volume of a new catalogue raisonné represent an intense ten-year period of Hilma af Klint’s (1862-1944) life that would lay the foundation for her later achievements. In 1896, af Klint and four other women formed The Five, a group steeped in the spiritualist beliefs permeating Europe at that time, including theosophy, Rosicrucianism and other strains of liberal religious thought. From 1896 to 1907, The Five engaged in a daily systematic method of spiritual experimentation. During séances, Hilma af Klint drew automatic spiritual sketches based on the messages that the medium (not always the same member) communicated from the spirits the group summoned. The elaborate system of symbols, geometry and biological imagery that characterize her work all find their origin during this period.
2021, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 184 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - Out of stock
The second instalment in an epic and authoritative seven-volume Hilma af Klint catalogue raisonné: the pioneering abstractionist’s beloved The Paintings for the Temple series.
Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created 193 paintings that she would title The Paintings for the Temple. Colourful, mostly abstract, with biomorphic imagery, these works expressed af Klint’s mediumistic vision of spiritual reality, which she hoped would ultimately be installed in a round temple for true spiritual comprehension and enlightenment. Since the internationally acclaimed Guggenheim exhibition of 2018-19, these works have come to number among her most popular, defining and beloved.
This handsomely produced clothbound volume collects these paintings in the second of a projected and collectible seven-volume catalogue raisonné that will present the entirety of af Klint’s work in its dazzling totality for the first time. Produced in cooperation with the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, it features introductions by Daniel Birnbaum, former head of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and architect of the grand af Klint exhibitions between 2013 and 2019, and Kurt Almqvist, President of the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit.
About the Authors
Kurt Almqvist is the President of Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art critic, the artistic director of Acute Art in London and former director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm
2021, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 144 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - In stock -
This third volume of the artist’s catalogue raisonné collects sketches made in preparation for af Klint’s masterwork The Paintings for the Temple
Hilma af Klint rarely exhibited her work during her lifetime, and her magnum opus, The Paintings for the Temple, was shown to the public in the series of exhibitions that started in 2013 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and ended with the grand exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2018-19. This series of 193 paintings began with af Klint receiving communication from an otherworldly figure during a séance. Specific themes, such as evolution and duality, are conveyed through vivid pastel colour schemes and intricate geometric patterns arranged carefully on canvases that reach over ten feet in height.
This volume, the third in the artist’s first seven-part catalogue raisonné, contains the sketches and preparatory work af Klint made in anticipation of The Paintings for the Temple. af Klint traveled with these sketchbooks so as to be able to show her friends her work in a more accessible format.
About the Authors
Kurt Almqvist is the President of Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art critic, the artistic director of Acute Art in London and former director of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm
2020, English
Hardcover, 152 pages, 23 x 29 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$50.00 - Out of stock
A handsomely redesigned edition of essays examining af Klint's final abstractions, edited Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage.
The result of a series of lectures delivered during the 2016 Serpentine Galleries exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, this volume gathers essays examining the last abstract series made by Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). The paintings were all created in the first half of the year 1920 and are the last paintings af Klint made before turning to watercolor. Reproductions of these images are complemented by essays from Briony Fer, David Lomas, Branden W. Joseph, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum, which shed new light on af Klint and her importance for artists today, also addressing the need for a broader conception of art history that her work proposes. Beautifully redesigned by Sweden's most famous designer, this book is a key contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on this immensely popular painter.
2017, English
Softcover (die-cut), 244 pages, 19 x 26 cm
Published by
Walker Art Centre / Minneapolis
$88.00 $50.00 - In stock -
Edited with text by Fionn Meade. Foreword by Olga Viso. Texts by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Robert Wiesenberger.
Question the Wall Itself examines ways that interior spaces and décor can be fundamental to the understanding of cultural identity. It showcases 23 international artists who explore the political and social dimensions of interior architecture as well as its complicated relationship to history and their own backgrounds. The featured artists are Jonathas de Andrade, Uri Aran, Nina Beier, Marcel Broodthaers, Tom Burr, Alejandro Cesarco, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Theaster Gates, Ull Hohn, Janette Laverrière, Louise Lawler, Nick Mauss, Park McArthur, Lucy McKenzie, Shahryar Nashat, Walid Raad, Seth Siegelaub, Paul Sietsema, Florine Stettheimer, Rosemarie Trockel, Cerith Wyn Evans, Danh Vo and Akram Zaatari.
The book and the exhibition it accompanies take as its guiding principle what Marcel Broodthaers termed “esprit décor”: a critique of ideas of nationality, globalization and the space of the institution through constructed interior scenes. Recasting our conception of interior space and design, the featured works exist between art, prop, and set or stage. Espousing this mise-en-scène approach, Question the Wall Itself plugs readers into material that expands the show in the form of book-as-exhibition. It includes an extensive photographic walk-through of the installations, and essays by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Fionn Meade, and Robert Wiesenberger, as well as contributions from participating artists.
2019, English
Softcover, 28 pages, 16.5 x 23.6 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$28.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
Hungarian artist Révész László László's "Where is the Mirror?", published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2019. First Edition.
László László Révész is a Hungarian painter and performance artist. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 1981 and an MA in animation from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest in 1986. The director of Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, France Lóránd Hegyi says about the drawings of Révész: "The subversive, destabilizing and irritating mixture of hidden irrationality, silent improbability and a – seemingly – innocent banality creates the basic narrative embodied in the drawings of Laszlo Laszlo Revesz..."
2015, English
Softcover (wiro bound), 84 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st ed. of 500 copies,
Published by
The Narrows / Melbourne
$30.00 $5.00 - In stock -
Jon Campbells new artist’s book, Lettering brings together a collection of works on paper made over the past 10 years. Ranging from intimate doodles to highly rendered texts this is the first time these works have been published as a group. The book also contains a series of photographic stills as well as pages containing images of paintings that relate directly to the drawings.
1st edition of 500 copies.
2016, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Surpllus / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
When a still painting shows us that we are moving' presents Melbourne painter and installation artist David Thomas' latest body of work, Impermanences. Featuring contributions from Kit Wise, Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania; Dr Michael Graeve, a visual and sound artist; and David Thomas.
David Thomas lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1951 and arrived in Australia in 1958. Thomas has exhibited internationally for the past four decades, including in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and throughout Europe.
Thomas’ work is represented in public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Australian National Gallery, Art Bank, Trinity College, University of Melbourne, RMIT University, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Cripp’s Collection (Australia and UK); Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, Canterbury University (New Zealand); Lim Lip Museum (South Korea); and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Theodor F. Leifeld Stiftung, and Kunstmuseum Ahlen (all Germany). He has received awards from the Australia Council, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Arts Victoria, and has participated in residencies at the Cité International des Arts (Paris), Two Rooms Gallery (Auckland), Centre for Drawing Research, Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts (London), and Porthmeor Studios (St. Ives, UK).
Thomas has curated numerous exhibitions and written extensively on the subject of monochrome painting. He is a Professor of Fine Art at RMIT University in Melbourne where he has taught since 1992. Thomas holds an MA in Fine Art (Painting) and a PhD from RMIT University.
2021, English / German
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
The March issue of Texte zur Kunst, titled “Comedy,” investigates the comedic in art while also examining mass-media formats such as TV series and films. Comedy not only offers consolation and comfort by making the tragic seem comic; for the repressed, it also serves as a catalyst, addressing and thematizing repression through jokes, slapstick, or the grotesque. However, at a time when audiences increasingly demand political commitment and authenticity from art, comedic speech, which is inherently disingenuous, has fallen into disrepute: ironically distanced rhetoric is accused of turning a blind eye to social inequality. Together with Bert Rebhandl, author and co-publisher of the film magazine cargo, the editors conceptualized an issue that examines the role of the joke in art, the psychoanalytic dimension of the comedic, and the limits of satire in the age of Donald Trump.
With contributions by/features on Jennifer A. Greenhill, Kevin B. Lee, Matthias Dell, Glenn Ligon, Jan Böhmermann, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Alenka Zupančič, Lynne Tillman, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Bert Rebhandl, Gregory Williams, Andrea Fraser, Lukas Foerster, Seinfeld, Larry David, Christiane Kues, Pujan Karambeigi, Amalia Ulman, Michaela Ott, Iris Därmann, Max Heinrich, Helvetia Leal, Sofia Bempeza, Talia Kwartler, Kai Althoff, Bernard Leach, Saim Demircan, Kim Jones, Samantha Ozer, Wu Tsang, Susanne Von Falkenhausen, Aby Warburg, Daniel Sturgis, Maxwell Alexandre, Genevieve Lipinsky De Orlov, Rosemary Mayer, Akili Tommasino, Howardena Pindell, Awol Erizku, Anna Voswinckel, Marianne Wex, Sarat Maharaj, Marion Von Osten, Françoise Vergès, Madeleine Bernstorff, Ross Bleckner, Douglas Gordon, Amy Sillman …
2020, English / German
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - In stock -
"Exactly three decades after the inaugural issue of TZK was published, we return to the question of where the hard-won and still-embattled rights of women* stand. With this issue, entitled ‘The Feminist’, we celebrate 30 years of controversial discussions about contemporary art and culture. We have invited 30 artists, critics, curators, and theorists of art and culture to talk about a cultural object that they believe is currently of particular interest from a feminist perspective. In highlighting feminist discourses that are especially relevant to the present moment, this issue should illustrate the plurality of thinkers who contribute to feminist projects today. A gesture to the unity and the alliances that critique grounded in solidarity can build!” —from the editorial by Isabelle Graw, Katharina Hausladen, and Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov.
With contributions by Isabelle Graw, Jeanetta Rich, Mirjam Thomann, Amanda Schmitt, Christian Liclair, Juliane Rebentisch, Jessica Aimufua, Katharina Hausladen, Nikita Gale, Beate Söntgen, Stacey Gillian Abe, Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov, Taylor Le Melle, Victoria Sin, Julia Heldt, Nadja Abt, Alina Astrova, Astrid Mania, Hanna Magauer, Brigitte Weingart, Paul Niedermayer, Keren Cytter, Steven Warwick, Bini Adamczak, Raphaela Vogel, Miriam Zeh, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Violaine Huisman, Trakal …
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
"EVIL," the theme of this latest issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST is often understood as simply the opposite of “good,” and as pure immorality, evil is everywhere today, and somehow also nowhere. It is the “other” par excellence; something we ourselves never are, but by which one always measures one’s own distance. “Evil is over there, not here, not with me.” Given its ubiquity today, we offer texts that investigate what this thing we call “evil” is, as it so often functions as the polar opposite of that which people hold to be just and right. Indeed, who could argue that point, and yet. In this issue, we look specifically at evil’s manifestations in the art world, and in film, politics, and theory, always with an eye toward evil as something potentially playful and ironic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
OLIVER PRECHT
TALKING ABOUT EVIL / Reflections on Moral Judgment
SUPERNATURE / Amanda Schmitt in Conversation with Loretta Fahrenholz, Madeline Hollander, and Monica Mirabile
MAX CZOLLEK
EVIL / Some Thoughts on the Contemporaneity of a Category
REMAIN IN DARK / Interview between Colin Lang and Stephen O’Malley
A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF SOCIAL SADISM / by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Kerstin Stakemeier
NEW DEVELOPMENT
BESEELTE GABEN IM TAUSCHSYSTEM / Überlegungen zur Malerei von Jack Whitten anlässlich der Ausstellung “Jack Whitten. Jack’s Jacks“ im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
ROTATION
BEING POROUS / Alice Blackhurst on Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs
IMPURITY AND ENTANGLEMENT / Adam Butler in Conversation with Ben Lerner
REVIEWS
A CHIROGRAPHIC IMAGINARY / Colin Lang on Edmund de Waal at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
ANDERE ORTE / Elisa R. Linn über Ariane Müller bei Schiefe Zähne, Berlin
ARCHIVING INSPIRATION / Dave Beech on Albert Oehlen at the Serpentine Gallery, London
MYALGIE / Jessica Aimufua über Diamond Stingily im Kunstverein München
GO TELL IT ON THE ISLAND / Nadja Abt über die 16. Istanbul Biennale
INTIMATE INVESTIGATIONS / Jesi Khadivi on Sharon Hayes at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
ICH BIN ELEKTRISCH / Hans-Christian Dany über Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) in der Halle für Kunst Lüneburg
HUNGRY MINDS / Rachel Haidu on Leidy Churchman at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
VERFREMDEND NAH / Stephanie Holl-Trieu über „The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue“ in den KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
POETS AND ARTFANS / Pujan Karambeigi on Sarah Rapson at Essex Street, New York
EROSION UND WACHSTUM / Markues über „Soil Is an Inscribed Body. Über Souveränität und Agrarpoesien“ bei SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
MATERIAL FUTURES / Adrienne Ange Rooney on Lubaina Himid at the New Museum, New York
DIES IST KEIN PHALLUS / Francesca Raimondi über „Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf“
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? / Chris Reitz on Latoya Ruby Frazier at the Renaissance Society, Chicago
MAGISCHE POLITIK / Fiona Geuß über Andrea Bowers in der Weserburg, Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen
MOTHER OF PEARL / Enzo Shalom on Nicolás Guagnini at Bortolami, New York
(BE-)ZEUG DICH! / Alida Müschen über Julia Phillips im Kunstverein Braunschweig
GHOSTS NOT WELCOME / Nina Prader on Omer Fast at the Salzburger Kunstverein
CRITICAL AFFECTIONS / Sophie Goltz über „Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s“ in der National Gallery in Singapur
ZWISCHEN ALLEN STÜHLEN / Dorothea Zwirner über Senga Nengudi im Lenbachhaus, München
NACHRUFE / OBITUARIES
SARAH SCHUMANN (1933−2019) by Vojin Saša Vukadinović
DOUGLAS CRIMP (1944–2019) by Marc Siegel
DOUGLAS CRIMP (1944-2019) by Louise Lawler
DOUGLAS CRIMP (1944-2019) by Juliane Rebentisch
EDITION
JESSICA STOCKHOLDER
RAPHAELA VOGEL
JORINDE VOIGT
2012, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
These interrelated meditations explore the nature of the individual spirit and the individual spiritedness of the natural world. As skilled a philosopher as she is a poet, in Sea & Fog, Adnan weaves multiple sonic, theoretical, and syntactic pleasures at once.
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958–1972. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.
2017, English
Hardcover, 162 pages, 23 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heide Museum of Modern Art / Victoria
$40.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
For more than one hundred years, artists have drawn inspiration from the early twentieth-century avant-garde movement Constructivism. Its abstract forms, utopian ideals and vision of art’s vital role in constructing a new society have continued to act as a beacon for artists of successive generations in many countries. This extensive survey of over seventy artists explores how Australian artists have responded to this ground breaking modernist movement and its enduring call upon their imaginations from the 1930s to the present day.
Essay contributions by curators Sue Cramer, Lesley Harding plus additional focus texts by 24 acclaimed Australian writers and curators.
Works illustrated by Australian artists Ralph Balson, Frank Hinder, Inge King, Kerrie Poliness, Justin Andrews, Peter Cripps, Gunter Christmann, George Johnson, Robert Owen, Rose Nolan, John Nixon, Justene Williams and Zoë Croggon, among many others alongside those by key proponents of the original movement, such as Russian artists Rodchenko, Malevich, El Lissitzky and Alexandra Exter from Russia, and British artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.
Hardcover catalogue published to accompany the exhibition of the same name 5 July - 8 October 2017 at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria.
2017, English
Hardcover, 792 pages, 17.3 x 26.3 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Created by curator Mathieu Copeland and artist Balthazar Lovay, together with a stellar list of contributors, The Anti-Museum presents the first extensive exploration of the radical and paradoxical concept that is ‘the anti-museum’ – a term so present in Art History and yet that has never been the object of an investigation and definition.
The museum is constantly a target for criticism, whether it comes from artists, thinkers, curators, or even the public. From the avant-gardes of the twentieth century up to present day, the museumʼs suspect position has generated countless gestures, iconoclastic actions, scathing attacks, utopias, and alternative exhibition spaces.
For the first time, this anthology is devoted to the anti-museum, through anti-art, the anti-artist, anti-exhibition, as well as anti-architecture, anti-philosophy, anti-religion, anti-cinema and anti-music. This notion (unpatented but regularly reappropriated) traces the erratic and sometimes paradoxical counter-history of the contestation of artistic institutions.
From the first anti-exhibition to the first catalogue retracing the history of Closed Exhibitions, from Dada to Noise music, from ‘Everything is Art’ to NO!art, the Japanese avant-gardes to Lettrist cinema, and not forgetting such major protest figures as Gustav Metzger, Henry Flynt, Graciela Carnevale, and Lydia Lunch, The Anti-Museum sketches a polyphonic panorama where negation is accompanied by a powerful breath of life.
This encyclopedic tome includes the work of over 80 artists and writers including Marcel Broodthaers, Maurizio Cattelan, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Smithson, Jean Tinguely, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Yvonne Rainer, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kenneth Goldsmith, George Maciunas, and Bob Nickas.
2021, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 15 x 22.6 cm
Published by
The Drawing Center / New York
$44.00 - Out of stock
The first book dedicated to these pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image making. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body--or that of another person--with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Hammons' body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States.
More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper exemplify Hammons' celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body, and his biting critique of racial oppression. The 32 body prints highlighted in this volume introduce the major themes of a 50-year career that has become central to the history of postwar American art. The book features a conversation between curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, as well as a photo essay by photographer Bruce W. Talamon, who documented Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974.
Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 20 and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. He moved to New York in 1978.
1975, French
Softcover, 170 pages, 27 x 21cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais / Paris
$55.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this comprehensive and profusely illustrated catalogue produced to accompany the survey major exhibition of the work of German artist Max Ernst, at Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais, in Paris in 1975.
Designed in landscape form, this curious and very generous catalogue is illustrated throughout with colour and black and white reproductions of Ernst's paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages, frottage, graphics, etchings, etc., running chronologically and featuring columns of autobiographical testimonies and theoretical writings of Max Ernst, memories of friends, poetry, reflections, and correspondences with other artists, their dedicated artworks/portraits, writings by critics, writers or other artists (Tristan Tzara, Hans Bellmer, Robert Motherwell, Hans Arp, Paul Eluard, Patrick Waldberg, Benjamin Péret, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Lebel, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Richter, Georges Bataille, Herny Miler, and many others), etc. set in parallel, relating to reproductions of his work, social photographs, and other imagery. Also features a bibliography, list of works, and texts by Werner Spies and others. Still one of the best catalogues on the artist. All texts are in their original French.
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
Rubbed covers otherwise Very Good throughout.
1980, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 28 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the long out-of-print monograph on the work of Sidney Sime (1867-1941), remembered for his fantastic and satirical artwork, especially his story illustrations for Irish author Lord Dunsany. Published in 1980, Master of the Mysterious collects Sime's incredible paintings, illustrations and graphic works, which are extremely hard to find documented anywhere today, alongside in-depth biographical texts by authors Simon Heneage and Henry Ford, tracing his entire life and career. Includes bibliography, published works, and a full index, making it the most comprehensive resource on the artist ever printed.
"Sidney Sime is probably the greatest imaginative English artist since Blake." — Hannen Swaffer, The Graphic, 1922
Sidney Sime (1867-1941) was an artist whose mysterious and fantastic illustrations were published in the well-known magazines of the turn of the century. He was also a graphic humorist, theatre designer and book illustrator whose imagery became inseparable from the new world of weird fiction and books of horror. Along with long and harmonious collaboration with Lord Dunsany, the Irish story-teller and playwright, a partnership without peer in the annals of fantasy illustration, Sime also provided illustrations to stories by William Hope Hodgson and Arthur Machen, amongst others. Mentioned in the same breath as Goya, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen, there is nothing quite like the mysterious works of Sime. Born in Manchester in poverty, Sime began his career working in the mines, before studying at the Liverpool School of Art. Sime had a meteoric career. He rose from pit-boy to artist in the space of a few years and made his name in London largely as an illustrator though he was also a painter of distinction. His abhorrence of Exhibitions (‘that last infirmity of senile kind’) and the effect of the First World War when artists tended to join movements and become socially conscious left the self-doubting individualist Sime somewhat isolated, becoming a recluse in his country house in Surrey. While his reputation languished and talent was neglected by a wider audience, his profound influence has been recorded in the work of writer H. P. Lovecraft and artist Roger Dean. One wouldn't be surprised if Sydney Sime's imagery was a precursor to worlds later created by Miyazaki, Dr. Seuss, and Moebius.
Very Good copy.
2007, English
Softcover (spray-painted), 96 pages, 30 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Peres Projects / Los Angeles
$100.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
First, limited edition first issue of Daddy Magazine, brings together texts by Bruce LaBruce and Richard Lidinsky interviewing AA Bronson, with artwork by Terence Koh, John Kleckner, Dean Sameshima, assume vivid astro focus, Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Nate Lowman, Bruce Nauman, Matt Greene, Dan Colen, Yves Klein, Joe Bradley, Bruce LaBruce, General Idea, Erik Hanson, Rodney Werden, Matthias Herrmann and AA Bronson. This issue is a special edition by American artist Terrence Koh with each cover painted in gold by the artist and (almost) every page methodically crossed out with a large black sharpie marker. Long out of print.
Very Good copy with some cover wear.
1966, German
Softcover (staple-bound), 22 pages, 20.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Self-published / Berlin
$35.00 - In stock -
Very early self-published catalogue on the work of German artist Lambert Maria Wintersberger (1941-2013), published around 1966. Illustrated throughout with Wintersberger's paintings in colour and b/w reproductions, alongside portrait, exhibition history and essays by Manfred de la Motte and Heinz Ohff.
Very Good copy.
Born 1941 in Munich, Germany, Wintersberger studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy from 1961 to 1964. Beginning in the early 1960’s, he worked as an independent artist and was associated with Germany’s “Neue Wilde” painters, which included such artists as Baselitz, Penck, and Hödicke. From 1974 to 1979, he taught at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. He exhibited extensively throughout his native Germany and Europe, including the Ulmer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and the Leoppold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren. In 1987 he spent a year living and working at an artist’s colony in Omaha, Nebraska. Wintersberger and his wife Dolores lived in Alsace, France for many years. The artist died in 2013.
2014, English
Softcover (2 volume set), 784 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$75.00 - Out of stock
The first retrospective collection of 50 years of writing by our leading Arab-American innovative writer.
This landmark two-volume edition follows Adnan’s work from the infernal elegies of the 1960s to the ethereal meditations of her later poems, to form a portrait of an extraordinarily impassioned and prescient life. Ranging between essay, fiction, poetry, memoir, feminist manifesto, and philosophical treatise, while often challenging the conventions of genre, Adnan’s works give voice to the violence and revelation of the last six decades as it has centered, in part, within the geopolitics of the Arab world, and in particular the author’s native Beirut. Among the key works reproduced in their entirety are Sitt Marie Rose (1978); The Arab Apocalypse (1980); Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986); and Of Cities & Women (1993).
Love, for Adnan, is our only way to endure upheaval. It is not sentimental love. It is an ethics that seeks to preserve what we have rather than see it destroyed. It is a particular bravery, too. “Love in all its forms is the most important matter that we will ever face, but also the most dangerous, the most unpredictable, the most maddening,” Adnan writes.“But it is also the only salvation I know of.” - Andrew Durbin, novelist and Editor in Chief of Frieze Magazine
1990, English / Spanish
Softcover, 152 pages, 29.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fundación Caja de Pensiones / Madrid
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this rare and most comprehensive catalogue on the work of Italian artist Domenico Gnoli, published on the occasion of a major survey in Madrid at Fundación Caja de Pensiones in 1990. Profusely illustrated throughout with Gnoli's paintings, drawings and sculptures. Illustrated texts in English and Spanish by French author André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Italian critic Renato Barilli and painter Yannick Vu, along with an illustrated biography, exhibition history and full list of Gnoli's works.
Domenico Gnoli (1933 - 1970) was an Italian painter and stage designer, born in Rome. He studied stage design at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and began a short stint
Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) is a unique and difficult figure to place. He died young, at 36, and lived fast, hanging with a glamorous crowd and marrying twice. He began as a stage designer in Rome, for which he was well received. He was also a successful illustrator, spending the better part of his life in New York City, illustrating for magazines such as Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, where he found favour with art director Leo Lionni in the 1960s. He was also a painter. His paintings exhibited internationally, characteristically zooming in on some crisp fragment of a domestic interior or sartorial flourish: a perfectly made bed, with a serenely patterned spread, or the top of a man’s head, hair meticulously parted. "Gnoli’s paintings are neither Pop nor Surrealist, though they have trace elements of both within them. Their realism is clear enough, and traditional, but the too-closeness of Gnoli’s gaze gives one the sense that abstraction is eating reality up from within."
Very Good copy.
2020, English
Hardcover (cloth), 264 pages, 29.2 x 25 cm
Published by
Museum of Fine Arts / Boston
$100.00 - Out of stock
Luscious reproductions of more than 50 of Twombly's paintings, drawings and little-known sculptures, along with classical works of art, tell the story of an American abstractionist’s poetical dialogue with antiquity.
Cy Twombly's first visit to Italy as a young man ignited a lifelong passion for classical culture that is everywhere present in his art. Painted canvases, works on paper and small-scale sculptures reveal the historical soul of Twombly's abstract compositions. Taking on myths and heroes as personal guides, he created a psychologically complex dialogue with the visual and literary art of antiquity.
This sumptuously illustrated publication reproduces a carefully chosen selection of the artist's paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside works of classical antiquity, including a number from his personal collection. Illuminating essays by leading scholars and writers, including Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes and Mary Jacobus, explore the often enigmatic engagement of Twombly's art with the world of the past.
Edited with text by Christine Kondoleon, Kate Nesin. Text by Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes, Mary Jacobus.
Cy Twombly (1928-2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia, and lived and worked in New York in the early 1950s and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After traveling around North Africa, Spain and Italy, he settled in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life.
2019, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Hirmer / Münich
$80.00 - Out of stock
Abstract paintings were being produced even before Kandinsky. Completely independently from each other, Georgiana Houghton (1814 - 1884) in England, Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944) in Sweden and Emma Kunz (1892 - 1963) in Switzerland each developed an individual abstract pictorial language. What they had in common was a desire to make visible the laws of nature, the intellect and the supernatural. In 2019 their works were presented side by side for the first time in an exhibition and this beautiful hardcover publication documents this occasion.
The three women artists all found their artistic language within the context of the spiritual movements of their times: Houghton in spiritism, af Klint in theosophy and Kunz in naturopathy. Their artworks bear witness to a “mediumistic” praxis: Houghton and af Klint were inspired by higher beings to paint, while Kunz developed her drawings with the help of a pendulum. In addition, the volume shows stills by Harry Smith and James and John Whitney, who – inspired by various occult movements – made experimental films during the 1940s.