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.
2019, English
Hardcover, 464 pages, 24.1 x 31.5 cm
Published by
Petzel Gallery / New York
$70.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Wade Guyton, Petzel, New York, 1.16.14 - 2.22.14 is the long-awaited volume that documents a one night only performance hosted at Petzel Gallery as part of Guyton's seminal 2014 exhibition, in which the artist made long horizontal black paintings stretched to precisely fit the gallery walls. In 2007, Guyton showed a series of black paintings made with his Epson 9600 printer and covered the gallery's concrete floor with a facsimile of his studio's plywood floor. For the 2014 exhibition, he made five new works on linen using the same digital file from 2007, this time enlarged to accommodate the increased width of an Epson 11880. The works were turned on their sides, hung horizontally and stretched to fit the gallery walls. Two of them were jammed in a corner. In addition to the five paintings, he presented a new wood and concrete sculpture that took its form from the coat check counter at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, where concurrently he had installed four paintings for the International.
On February 17, 2014 the gallery hosted performances by James Campbell, I.U.D., and Blondes. Wade Guyton, Petzel, New York, 1.16.14 - 2.22.14 features over 400 illustrated pages of documentary footage from that performance and includes an essay by art historian Bettina Funcke entitled "Guyton's Rooms." The book was designed by Wade Guyton, Joseph Logan, and Zach Steinman.
2017, English / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and slipcase), 356 pages, 31.8 x 29 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$160.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
In the last two years, Wade Guyton has created a compelling new series of artworks, which this publication presents in all its breadth and complexity.
In the series, he opens his art to new modes of visual depiction as well as the world around him by adopting the practices of taking snapshots and screen captures common to our increasingly digital experience.
In so doing, he follows the rapid extension and ramification of the digital code into all areas of life, through recording the daily reading of the newspaper, the view from his window, the act of reflecting on his paintings and sculptures, as well as a view into their magnified digital matrix.
English and German text.
Shop display copy, some wear, missing slipcase, otherwise new.
2012, English
Hardcover, 268 pages, 196 x 260 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
Dia Foundation / New York
$86.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeously quiet in color and composition, Agnes Martin's paintings have a distinctive grace that sets them apart from those of the Abstract Expressionists of her day and the Minimalist artists she inspired. Martin attributed her grid-based works to metaphysical motivations, lending a serene complexity to her oeuvre that has defied any easy categorization. Perhaps for this reason, critical and scholarly analysis of her paintings has been scarce-until now. This important new anthology brings together the most current scholarship on Martin's paintings by twelve multidisciplinary essayists who consider various aspects of the artist's four-decade career. Organized by Dia Art Foundation, whose extensive holdings of Martin's paintings and ambitions to support in-depth research on the works are unparalleled, the publication brings renewed focus and energy to Martin's career and her contributions to the art historical narrative.
Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly
Texts by Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, Rhea Anastas, Douglas Crimp, Jonathan D. Katz, Michael Newman
1952, French
Softcover, 26 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gariel-Giraud / Paris
$350.00 - Out of stock
First, very rare 1952 edition of this important piece of art history, considered the manifesto of "L'art Informel". Published in an edition of only 1000 copies, Michel Tapié's book Un Art Autre (Art of Another Kind) defined a tendency in postwar European painting that he saw as a radical break with all traditional notions of order and composition—an art that worked through ‘paroxysm, magic, total ecstasy’. This dominant trend of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s was characterised by an improvisatory approach and highly gestural technique, much aligned with America's Abstract Expressionism. In describing such work he used the term art informel (from the French ‘informe’, meaning unformed or formless), and presented the exemplary works of Wols, Herni Michaux, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu, Ruth Francken, René Guiette, Victor Brauner, Alfonso A. Ossorio, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jean Fautrier, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Karel Appel, Mario Sironi, Camille Bryen, Alberto Burri, Hans Hofmann, Claire Falkenstein, Slavko Kopač, Germaine Richier, Graham Sutherland, Sam Francis, Mark Rothko, Gianni Dova, Jaroslav Serpan, André-Pierre Arnal, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Lucio Fontana, Roberto Matta, Eduardo Paolozzi, Willem de Kooning, and more.
Very Good copy with tanning from age and light spotting. Beautifully preserved copy.
2014, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 23.5 x 30 cm
Ed. of 750,
Published by
Rainoff / Sydney / New York
$45.00 $20.00 - In stock -
Oscillating between pure abstraction and perfect representation while adhering fully to neither, Janitz' paintings reference real-world forms yet resist actual formal depiction. Employing broad swashes of paint mixed with cold wax medium or flour to a background of oil, Janitz' paintings assume two primary styles.
Firstly, his abstract smear paintings, which evoke various manual gestures such as spreading butter on bread, grouting tiles or washing windows, as if to negate themselves in an act of self-criticism and doubt, conceal their layers below with broad, mostly vertical brush strokes—their opacity turned down half way only to reveal another painting below.
Another iconographic series are Janitz' portraits which present only the backs of subjects' heads. As if to literally turn it's back on the viewer—on it's audience—the paintings' subject looks out at it's own vista disregarding ours and displaying it's indifference to our gaze while addressing and challenging painting's historical love affair with the "portrait."
Employing the tenets of an artist's book while simultaneously functioning as the first monographic publication on Robert Janitz' work, Ex Libris references his dedication to the balance between exposure and obfuscation, the private and the known. Including a reprint of Joy William's seminal short story The Yard Boy and a complete facsimile of Heta Kircher Janitz' 1959 Masters thesis on fabric weaving, the book examines the dead-pan poetry that typifies the artist's work.
Design: Siniša Mačković and Robert Milne
First edition of 750 copies.
2020, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 24.1 x 29.2 cm
Published by
National Gallery of Art / Washington
$120.00 - Out of stock
Text by Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, Kate Nesin. Contributions by Jennifer Roberts, Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman, Rirkrit Tiravanija.
A sweeping retrospective of Philip Guston’s influential work, from Depression-era muralist to abstract expressionist to tragicomic contemporary master
Philip Guston—perhaps more than any other figure in recent memory—has given contemporary artists permission to break the rules and paint what, and how, they want. His winding career, embrace of “high” and “low” sources, and constant aesthetic reinvention defy easy categorization, and his 1968 figurative turn is by now one of modern art’s most legendary conversion narratives. “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”
And so Guston’s sensitive abstractions gave way to large, cartoonlike canvases populated by lumpy, sometimes tortured figures and mysterious personal symbols in a palette of juicy pinks, acid greens, and cool blues. That Guston continued mining this vein for the rest of his life—despite initial bewilderment from his peers—reinforced his reputation as an artist’s artist and a model of integrity; since his death 50 years ago, he has become hugely influential as contemporary art has followed Guston into its own antic twists and turns.
Published to accompany the first retrospective museum exhibition of Guston’s career in over 15 years, Philip Guston Now includes a lead essay by Harry Cooper surveying Guston's life and work, and a definitive chronology reflecting many new discoveries. It also highlights the voices of artists of our day who have been inspired by the full range of his work: Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Thematic essays by co-curators Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene and Kate Nesin trace the influences, interests and evolution of this singular force in modern and contemporary art—including several perspectives on the 1960s and ’70s, when Guston gradually abandoned abstraction, returning to the figure and to current history but with a personal voice, by turns comic and apocalyptic, that resonates today more than ever.
2020, English
Hardcover, 208 pages, 25 x 21 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein / Vaduz
$80.00 - Out of stock
The first ever monograph on Steven Parrino.
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was one of the most influential artists of the New York art scene since the late 1980s. Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. Parrino’s work is defined by an unconditional will to be free that stems from American biker culture and is also influenced by punk rock existentialism. Borrowings from underground comics and the “Kustom Kulture” of the motorcycle world with its specific symbolic language are the main themes of his drawings in the early years. His monochrome painting in the tradition of “Radical Painting” evolved in parallel. As early as 1981 he began creating the large monochrome paintings that he violently slashed, tore or twisted off their stretchers, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting. Predominantly a painter, music played a role that was at least as important for his artistic practice. Drawing on various "high" and subcultural sources, Parrino created an oeuvre of painting and music that contradicted increasing social and cultural conformism and also provided a fresh and intelligent contribution to the debate on modernism's demise. Parrino died in a motorcycle accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
Parrino “came to painting at the time of its death, not to breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness.”
Heavily illustrated throughout with mostly full-page colour reproductions of his work, Steven Parrino: Nihilism Is Love includes texts by Konrad Bitterli, Catherine Dossin, Reinhard Ermen, Fabian Flückiger, Amy Granat, Pierre Huber, Friedemann Malsch, Matthew McCaslin, Olivier Mosset, Bob Nickas, Steven Parrino, Mai-Thu Perret, Amy O'Neill, Rolf Ricke, Marc- Olivier Wahler. Published on the occasion of the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in Europe.
1997, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 24 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$50.00 - Out of stock
Major catalogue on the extraordinary work of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, published on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in 1997. Profusely illustrated throughout in vivid colour, accompanied by texts by curator Judith Ryan, biography and bibliography. Ginger's own specially created alphabet of letters have been used throughout to create the headings of each section.
Ginger Riley Munduwalawala (circa 1936 – 1 September 2002) was one of Australia's most well-known contemporary artists, one whose distinctive pictorial style and adventurous sense of colour sets him apart from other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists of his generation. He was born in the Limmen Bight area of the Gulf of Carpentaria coast. His first language was Marra, now a critically endangered language. Riley became an artist during the 1950s as a result of his encounter with Albert Namatjira. He painted his mother’s country, focusing on the weather-worn rock formations known as the Four Archers near the mouth of the Limmen Bight River in south-east Arnhem Land. Using bright, luminous and often contrasting colours and strong flattened forms, Riley depicted this landscape and its ancestral beings: Garimala the snake, who created the Four Archers; Ngak Ngak the white-breasted sea-eagle and guardian figure; the ceremonial shark’s liver tree; the Four Archers themselves; and the Limmen Bight River. Riley’s extraordinary creativity allowed him to reinvent this subject matter again and again, expressing in his work his vision of physical geography, creation knowledge and ancestral sites. His strong sense of place enabled this overview, and he painted, he has said, as if he was, ‘ … on a cloud, on top of the world, looking down … From the top I can see country right down to where I come from.’
Very Good copy, tanning to spine.
2017, English
Softcover, 576 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Ed. of 200,
Published by
Negative Press / Melbourne
$80.00 - In stock -
This monumental artists’ book returns Vito Acconci’s text, that inspired Nolan’s large scale installation of 282 painted hessian pennants 'Big Words (Not Mine) Read the words “public space”…', 2013, back to the codex form of the book. With Acconci’s text broken into strings of letters, the book interrogates the relationship between documentation and representation and explores Nolan’s continued interest in materials, process and seriality.
Design: Warren Taylor
Photography: Garry Sommerfeld
Published in an edition of 200 copies
2020, English
Hardcover, 272 pages, 21.7 x 28 cm
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
Moderna Museet / Malmö
$100.00 - In stock -
Rewriting the History of Abstract Painting.
Once considered an outsider artist, after her show at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half a million visitors, Hilma af Klint firmly established her place in art history. She has also been the subject of documentary films and biographies. In 2013, Iris Müller-Westermann organized the first retrospective exhibition of af Klint’s work. Now she presents us with the latest information and research in an extensive survey show, which she curated together with Milena Høgsberg, at the Moderna Museet in Malmö. Of crucial importance is the issue of spirituality in af Klint’s painting—how the artist managed to translate both the material and the immaterial world into a pictorial vision. The accompanying exhibition catalogue investigates, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by art historians, a quantum physicist, a spiritual teacher, and an historian of theosophy and esotericism, among others, provide insights into a world beyond the visible which fascinates us now even more than ever.
HILMA AF KLINT (1862–1944) studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She turned to abstraction in the wake of her profound exploration of spirituality and theosophy. She is regarded as a pioneer of abstract art.
Edited by Iris Müller-Westermann, Milena Hoegsberg, text(s) by Ernst Peter Fischer, Ylva Hillström, Milena Hoegsberg, Anne Sophie Joergensen, Caroline Levander, Hedvig Martin, Iris Müller-Westermann, Tim Rudboeg, graphic design by Patric Leo
2001, English
Hardcover, 184 pages, 29 x 21 cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$45.00 - In stock -
Hardcover artist's book by the great Robert MacPherson (b. 1937, Brisbane, Queensland), published on the occasion of the major solo exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2001. Profusely illustrated throughout with colour, landscape-orientated reproductions of MacPherson's classic, expansive series of drawings of drovers. All deliberately executed as if by the hand of a ten-year-old, over a 20-year period Robert MacPherson made these in the guise of his alter ego, Robert Pene, a grade 4 student at St Joseph’s Convent, Nambour, Queensland. Robert Pene has an obsession: he endlessly catalogues boss drovers in portraits that vividly evoke the resilient, determined spirit of the rugged individuals responsible for moving thousands of livestock and teams of stockmen and cooks along the great pastoral stock routes of Australia, travelling over vast distances from station to market, or finding feed and water in times of drought. The drovers series is an ongoing theme having detained MacPherson throughout much of his career as an artist.
Over the course of his 40-year career, Robert MacPherson has explored the philosophical propositions of what constitutes a work of art. He often incorporates familiar imagery, everyday materials and visual elements from daily life, honouring the beauty of the mundane. MacPherson’s fascination with systems of objects and language is manifested through broad fields of knowledge, including art history and social history, biology and mythology.
As New.
1998, English
Softcover, 28 pages, 21 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
$45.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published on the occasion of Heimo Zobernig's solo exhibition at Renaissance Society in 1996. Austrian Heimo Zobernig's work intervenes, rearranges, recontextualizes, and down-right makes fun of the architecture of museum/gallery spaces so as to demystify its illusory potential and reinscribe it with self-referentiality. Zobernig is among several significant contemporary artists such as Michael Asher, General Idea, and Daniel Buren who have made it their mission to critique sites of modern art.
In Zobernig's 1996 installation, the gallery walls from the Society's preceding exhibition were laid flat on the floor-a neat-handed figure/ground reversal turning support into sculpture. In another provocative turn, Zobernig brought the outside in to this altered gallery space via video - he had himself filmed cavorting around the Renaissance Society hallway naked in front of walls that were painted video back-drop blue; this image was then super-imposed on footage shot while driving around Chicago. This informative and engaging book, designed by Zobernig, serves as a valuable pictorial document, and an insightful critical analysis of this important work. Walker's essay speaks to the challenge Zobernig's art poses for art history and the implications of that challenge for the future of art. In addition, the catalog features a transcript of the panel discussion: Planned Obsolescence, in which a group of critics, curators and architectural historians gathered to discuss how Zobernig's practice differs from, or further informs, practices that have made an art out of calling for an end of art.
1988, English
Softcover (single fold-out card), 210 x 297
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Vasari Revisited: A Kunstkammer In Melbourne, organised by Michael Graf, at 200 Gertrude Street in 1988-89. Graf's Australian recreation of Studiolo of Francesco I in the Gertrude gallery! Illustrated text by Michael Graf throughout alongside a catalogue of exhibited works by Suzannah Barta, Stephen Bram, Angela Brennan, Gavin Brown, Tony Clark, Rebecca Driffield, Rozalind Drummond, Louise Forthun, Helena Gleeson, Michael Graf, Louise Harper, Matlu Hassan, Andrew Lehman, John Mackinnon, Anne-Marie May, Rob Mcleish, Dora Mcphee, Paul Morgan, Louise Murray, Elizabeth Newman, Amanda Ritson, Joanne Ritson, Sarah Ritson, Ian Russell, Anne Weir
Fine copy.
1989, English
Softcover (single fold-out card), 210 x 297
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Physical Culture: A Series Of Performances And An Exhibition Of Visual Culture, curated by Shelley Lasica, at 200 Gertrude Street in 1989. Introductory text by Lasica alongside a full list of performance and exhibited works by Stephen Bram, Elizabeth Newman, Louise Forthun, Mutlu Hassan, Melbourne Research Group, John De Silentio and Aleks Danko, Rosslynd Piggott, Shiralee Saul, Trevor Patrick, Teresa Blake and Dan Wilton, Jacqui Rutten, Sarah Ritson, Andrew Browne, Richard Todd.
Fine copy.
1995, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 23 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
$50.00 - Out of stock
Scarce catalogue, and first monograph on the work of Gaylen Gerber, published on the occasion of an exhibition of Gerber's work at The Renaissance Society in 1992, marking the culmination of a ten-year period in which Gerber persistently painted the same opaque, monochromatic still-life over and over, in a bold artistic assertion that seeing is not believing but simply perceiving. This catalogue documents the artist's installations of these paintings at various international exhibitions, including Documenta 9 in 1992, and Robbin Lockett Gallery in Chicago in 1988. At the Society's exhibition, Gerber hung a single row of his paintings abutted end to end on a wall crossing the entire gallery space.
Jan Avgiko's catalog essay, written in close tandem with Gerber, is a brilliant investigation of the role perceptual aesthetic theories play in the modernist and postmodernist monochrome.
Very Good-Fine copy.
2019, English
Softcover (leporello folded guide w. illustrations), 15 x 10 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Belgian Pavilion La Biennale Di Venezia / Venice
$10.00 - In stock -
Visitor's Guide (English edition) published to accompany the presentation "Mondo Cane" by Belgian art duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys for the 2019 Venice Biennale. This staple-bound booklet presents all the characters featured in "Mondo Cane" together with their biographies. Highly recommended.
The Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter (b. 1965) and Harald Thys (b. 1966) have collaborated for more than two decades on artworks in a variety of media, including film, photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture; they are known for thought-provoking works, often imbued with an antic sense of humor. Depression, autism, power games, psychosis, sexual tensions and idolatry are just a few of the interests that Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys have cited as crucial to their dark repertoire. The pair was selected to represent Belgium at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Its title, "Mondo Cane", refers to a 1962 Italian film that documented-in a style intended to provoke Western audiences-cultural practices from around the world.
2019, English / French / German / Dutch / Italian
Softcover, 224 pages, 21 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$69.00 - In stock -
The provocative and often comic Belgian art duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys present in book form their collaborative contribution to the 2019 Venice Biennale
The Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter (b. 1965) and Harald Thys (b. 1966) have collaborated for more than two decades on artworks in a variety of media, including film, photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture; they are known for thought-provoking works, often imbued with an antic sense of humor. Depression, autism, power games, psychosis, sexual tensions and idolatry are just a few of the interests that Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys have cited as crucial to their dark repertoire. The pair was selected to represent Belgium at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and this book accompanies and documents their exhibit, also titled Mondo Cane. The book is composed of a series of original, illustrated texts, written alternately in English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian. The texts are intended to evoke a variety of human conditions in an environment reminiscent of present-day Europe. Its title refers to a 1962 Italian film that documented-in a style intended to provoke Western audiences-cultural practices from around the world. Lavishly illustrated and designed by the artists themselves, this book both reflects de Gruyter and Thys's contribution to the Venice Biennale and is a work of art in its own right.
2012, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 17 x 24.4 cm
Published by
Surpllus / Melbourne
$30.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Hostings: Ocular Lab, 2003–10 documents and celebrates the eight-year history of Ocular Lab Inc., an artist-run initiative that occupied a disused milk bar in West Brunswick, Melbourne. The book features 96 pages of imagery, new essays by Stephen Zagala and Zara Stanhope, and a chronology of ‘the Lab’. Hostings was produced on the occasion of the exhibition Ocular Lab Inc. at the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 12 April – 5 May 2012.
Describing Ocular Lab in Frieze magazine, Max Delany wrote: ‘The activities and programme at Ocular Lab have evolved through a particular emphasis on hosting and dialogue and a desire for non-hierarchical collective processes. Ocular Lab dinners, held in the gallery space, often in honour of a visiting artist, became emblematic of a wider set of principles. The exhibition programme developed through individual members hosting projects, rather than by application or a committee judging process. Visiting artists always used the space rent-free, allowing for the space to be used in an open-ended spirit, often for process-based projects or as a temporary studio. And an array of international exchange projects took place in the space, ranging from artist talks and dinners through to longer-term site-specific projects.’
The Ocular Lab membership was Damiano Bertoli, Sandra Bridie, Julie Davies, Raafat Ishak, Sean Loughrey, Jonathan Luker, Sally Mannall, Tom Nicholson, Elvis Richardson, and Alex Rizkalla. Previous members include John Abbate, Katherine Huang, Louise Paramor, Kirsten Rann, and Bernhard Sachs.
Editors: Julie Davies & Brad Haylock
Design: Brad Haylock
Edition of 600 copies.
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 12 x 17 cm
Published by
Kunstverein / Amsterdam
$44.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
'Grace Crowley' is a publication based on letters sent to the Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890–1979) by friends, family, and colleagues. Parts of those letters, which are now housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the State Library of New South Wales archives in Sydney, were transcribed and categorized by Riet Wijnen in subsections such as ‘Marital Status’, ‘Teaching’, ‘Hosting’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘X’, ‘Being A Woman’, ‘War’, ‘$’, and ‘Making Work’. The result is an alternative biography constructed solely through a living set of relations.
2020, English
Softcover, 350 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$50.00 - In stock -
Exploring the relationship between art and pop music over the last fifty years.
Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what drew John Lennon, in turn, to visual art? Why, in 1982, did Joseph Beuys record the pop single “Sonne statt Reagan,” and why, around the same time did, West German artists such as Michaela Melián move into pop music?
In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Heiser looks closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. The seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring a pop and art history of more than fifty years, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while he points toward radical alternatives.
2001, English
Softcover (stapled), 18 pages (colour ill.), 32 x 23.5 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
Kunsthaus / Baselland
$55.00 - In stock -
Catalogue for the 2001 exhibition at Kunsthaus, Baselland
John Nixon is an Australian artist born in 1949, his Experimental Painting Workshop EPW – founded in 1990 – is not a physical workshop but an intellectual as well as a practical visual investigation into non-representational painting.
2018, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$33.00 - Out of stock
While the reputation of Remedios Varo (1908-63) the surrealist painter is now well established, Remedios Varo the writer has yet to be fully discovered. This volume brings together the painter's collected writings and includes an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances, dream accounts, notes for unrealised projects, a project for a theatre piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in surrealist automatic writing and prose poem commentaries on her paintings.
Remedios Varo Uranga (1908 – 1963) was a Spanish surrealist artist. Born in Anglès (north of Catalonia), Spain in 1908, she studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Varo spent her formative years between France and Barcelona and was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement. The summer of 1935 marked Varo's formal invitation into Surrealism when French surrealist Marcel Jean arrived in Barcelona. While still married to her first husband Gerardo Lizarraga, Varo met her second partner, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris with Péret leaving Lizarraga behind (1937). It was through Peret that Remedios Varo met André Breton and the Surrealist circle, which included Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, and Max Ernst among others. Shortly after arriving in France, Varo took part in the International Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and in Amsterdam in 1938. She was forced into exile from Paris during the German occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941 when the Mexican president, Lázaro Cardenas, made it a policy to welcome Spanish and European refugees. In Mexico, she met native artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but her strongest ties were to other exiles and expatriates, notably the English painter Leonora Carrington and the French pilot and adventurer, Jean Nicolle. However, because Mexican muralism still dominated the country's art scene, surrealism was not generally well received. She worked as an assistant to Marc Chagall with the design of the costumes for the production of the ballet Aleko, which premiered in Mexico City in 1942. In 1947, Péret returned to Paris, and Varo traveled to Venezuela, living there for two years. She returned to Mexico and began her third and last important relationship with Austrian refugee Walter Gruen, who had endured concentration camps before escaping Europe. Gruen believed fiercely in Varo, and he gave her the economic and emotional support that allowed her to fully concentrate on her painting. In 1955, Varo had her first solo exhibition at the Galería Diana in Mexico City. Buyers were put on waiting lists for her work. Even Diego Rivera was supportive. In 1960, her representative, Juan Martín, opened his own gallery and showed her work there, and opened a second in 1962. Only a year after that opening, at the height of her career, she died from a heart attack in Mexico City. Her work is well known in Mexico, but not as commonly known throughout the rest of the world.
2019, English
Softcover, 278 pages, 16 x 24 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$90.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary artist and intellectual Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959) moved too fast for art history, which is only now beginning to catch up with his many accomplishments. Born in Vienna, he moved to Paris in 1929, where he affiliated with the Surrealists. The artist’s original contribution to Surrealism were his so-called ‘Fumage pictures’. In these he painted hallucinatory motifs using candle smoke, some of which he continued associatively with oil paint, others he left in their own right. A member of the Abstraction-Création group in the mid 1930s, Paalen’s pictures and texts provided both support and inspiration for young representatives of American Abstract Expressionist painting such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He went into exile in Mexico in 1939 (at the invitation of Frida Kahlo), where he promoted the surrealist cause and edited the influential art magazine DYN. After the war he moved to San Francisco, forming the Dynaton Group with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican.
This beautiful catalogue is dedicated to all of the artist’s creative periods. His long-standing interest in collecting and researching the indigenous art of British Columbia and Mexico as well as his literary work are also illuminated in more detail. Includes texts by Dawn Ades, Colin Browne, Timur Alexander ElRafie, Markus Hallensleben, Christian Kloyber, Andreas Neufert, Stella Rollig, Franz Smola.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959): An Austrian Surrealist in Paris and Mexico at Belvedere, Vienna (4 October 2019 – 19 January 2020).
1971, French
Softcover, 48 pages, 22 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Orangerie des Tuileries / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this lovely, simple catalogue published in 1971 on the occasion of Max Ernst's 80th anniversary exhibition at Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris. 40 works illustrated in b/w with some colour. Full catalogue of exhibited works.
Good copy. Some age spotting to both covers, otherwise very good throughout.