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.
2018, English
Hardcover, 372 pages, 29.7 x 24.9 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$120.00 - In stock -
This extensive, over-sized hardcover catalogue offers a systematic and chronological overview of the multifaceted oeuvre of German artist, Jutta Koether. It goes back to her beginnings in the context of Neo Expressionism in Cologne in the early and mid-1980s, and her subsequent exploration of the colour red as an expressive device – presenting a response to the cliché of male painters. After moving to New York in the early 1990s, Koether began making breathtakingly intense and colourful large-scale paintings that layer motifs from pop culture, literature and art history in dense painterly gestures. In the early 2000s, the artist’s approach became increasingly involved with performance and music, culminating in inky black canvases and assemblage paintings incorporating devotional objects from Punk and ‘noise culture’. The final chapter of this retrospective is dedicated to Koetherʼs eccentric turn to history painting and her latest appropriations from art historyʼs visual memory.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Jutta Koether: Tour de Madame at Museum Brandhorst, Munich (18 May – 21 Oct 2018), and at Mudam Luxembourg, 2019.
2014, Japanese / French
Softcover, 240 pages, 25 x 25 cm
Published by
Asahi Shimbun / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Major monographic catalogue on the work of Balthus, published in 2014 for the great travelling retrospective exhibition in Japan, "The Last Master of the 20th Century".
Starting with pages reproducing Balthus' 40 plates for "Mitsou: Quarante Images par Baltusz", a book published in 1921 by Rotapfel-Verlag of Erlenbach-Zürich and Leipzig that included a preface by Rainer Maria Rilke, this entire catalogue is lavishly illustrated with colour reproductions of over 100 paintings and drawings from every stage of his career, including some never before published, alongside the artist's belongings works.
Along with the many reproductions of Balthus' works, each accompanied by texts and details, the book includes a chronology, bibliography, list of exhibitions, photographic portraits and pictures of Balthus' studio and works in progress throughout the years. The book takes an in-depth look at the life of this great European painter, with many essays in Japanese and French.
Throughout his career, Balthus rejected the usual conventions of the art world. He insisted that his paintings should be seen and not read about, and he resisted any attempts made to build a biographical profile. A telegram sent to the Tate Gallery as it prepared for its 1968 retrospective of his works read: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES. REGARDS. B."
Balthus (February 29, 1908 – February 18, 2001), was a Polish-French modern artist born in Paris to Polish expatriate parents. His given name was Balthasar Klossowski - his sobriquet "Balthus" was based on his childhood nickname, alternately spelled Baltus, Baltusz, Balthusz or Balthus. His father, Erich Klossowski, was an art historian who wrote a noted monograph on Daumier. His older brother was the philosopher and artist Pierre Klossowski. An unusual figure in the history of twentieth century painting, Balthus both traveled among and drew upon the work of other major artists of his time, while at the same time following a unique individual trajectory. He was mentored by, friends of, and/or even collaborated with seminal creative figures from different eras, including Antonin Artaud, André Breton, and Rainer Maria Rilke, while cultivating his own highly refined style of dreamlike, classically-informed painting. The scenes he usually depicted were very ordinary bourgeois interiors or outdoor settings, which nonetheless managed to reveal the heightened inner states of his subjects as well as the states of mind of those who might be viewing them.
"I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always with a slight touch of mystery in my paintings." - Balthus
2014, English / German
Softcover, 208 pages, 22 x 28 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$95.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
We rarely encounter letters or colors outside of their communicative or decorative functions. Yet detached from the flat surfaces they normally adorn, they become sculptural objects that collapse the divide between language and bodies.
Works 1965–Today stems from a retrospective held at the Grazer Kunstverein showcasing Josef Bauer’s experiments with language, color, and their spatial contexts nearly forty years after his last exhibition in Graz. His practice combines sculpture, installation, painting, and performance to disturb our perception of words and colors as mere “carriers” of meaning. By removing their two-dimensional context, letters become objects that communicate directly with our bodies in an unfiltered and urgent language called “tactile poetry.”
In addition to over one hundred career-spanning works by Bauer, this volume brings together critical commentary from a variety of experts. In his introduction, Krist Gruijthuijsen illuminates Bauer’s “tactile poetry” as a radical embodiment of ’60s Concrete poetry. In an essay from 1974, Austrian philosopher Thomas Zaunschirm explores Bauer’s formal bid to transcend the representational relation of language to images. Situating Bauer’s practice in a historical context, Bettina Steinbrügge throws light on the reception and development of his works. The book also includes a unique visual rejoinder by artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. Works 1965–Today is a vital introduction to this—until now—underrepresented master of letters and their contours.
Edited By Krist Gruijthuijsen
Contributions By Hans-Peter Feldmann, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Bettina Steinbrügge, Thomas Zaunschirm
1983, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 25 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Art Gallery of South Australia / Adelaide
$48.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Recent Australian Painting - A Survey 1970-1983" curated by Ron Radford in 1983, at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
"The exhibition RECENT AUSTRALIAN PAINTING: A Survey 1970-1983 is the first survey exhibition ever staged covering the whole period. It documents the major artists of the period and the overlapping movements or styles which can generally be labelled as Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Neo Realism, Political Art, Ocker Funk, Popism and New Image Painting."
Features the work of Arthur Boyd, Mike Brown, Robert Hunter, Jenny Watson, Paddy Carrol Tjungurrayi, Dini Nolan Tjampitjinpa, Robert Rooney, Juan Davila, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Robert Macpherson, John Nixon, Dale Frank, Fred Williams, Annette Bezor, Brett Whiteley, Dick Watkins, John Brack, Gunter Christmann, Gareth Sansom, Uta Uta Tjangala, and many others through full colour and black and white reproductions of works, plus biographies and texts.
2017, English
Softcover, 206 pages, 21.5 x 28 cm
Published by
Sequence Press / New York
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$65.00 $25.00 - In stock -
Edited by Katherine Pickard, Tim Saltarelli
Contributions by John Kelsey, David Lewis, Jaleh Mansoor, Javier Sánchez Martínez, Laura Owens, Sean Paul
Blake Rayne’s approach to painting stems from the duplicity of words like script, folder, application, dissolve, and screen. These operative terms situate his work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms painter and painting as fictions with no stable material definition. Rather, they are shaped by always-evolving social, institutional, and physical relations.
Published in conjunction with Rayne’s first survey exhibition “Cabin of the Accused” (Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, October 22, 2016–March 18, 2017), Tense and Spaced Out spans Rayne’s work over the last decade, featuring long-form essays by Sean Paul, Jaleh Mansoor, Javier Sánchez Martínez, and John Kelsey, and shorter statements by Laura Owens and David Lewis. Not confined to the role of mere catalogue, however, the publication also includes documentation of the exhibition by a group of local high-school students and a magazine dedicated to Rayne’s 2013 book-object Almanac.
Copublished with Sequence Press and Blaffer Art Museum
Design by Geoff Kaplan
2015, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$37.00 $25.00 - In stock -
Collection of graphic and textual work by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, dating from the seventies up till 2015. Compiled and designed by Julie Peeters, enriched with translations of facsimile material and a large amount of personal comments from the artist on the selected work. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Serving Compressed Energy with Vacuum in Kunstverein München from 25 April - 14 June 2015.
Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven (also known as AMVK) was born in Antwerp and lives in Antwerp and Berlin. She studied graphic design at the Fine Arts Academy in Antwerp and has been prolific in her output of drawings and other works on paper and synthetic material, as well as short videos, since the early eighties. Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven has been fascinated for a long time with the representation in the mass media of images of women, of interiors, of the kinetic powers of any kind of language. She investigates supra-moral connections in contemporary society s.a. between sex and technology. Her work connects different knowledge systems, explores the areas of the unconscious, and looks at moral aberrations or the obscene from a female point of view. In the nineties, hand-made paper works gave way to computer graphics, while text has always featured alongside images, underlining the message of Van Kerckhoven’s proud, sometimes exhibitionist female figures like song-lyrics. Music plays an important role in Van Kerchkoven’s creative production in parallel to her visual output, and she and Danny Devos have stood as a key pair of the Antwerp experimental music scene under the band name Club Moral (1981–now). Since 1982 she is represented by Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. And since 1999 also by Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin.
Since 2005 she is working on a conceptual and pictorial trialogue between the mystic Marguerite Porete, the hermetic Giordano Bruno and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
In 2015 she will be the subject of two major solo shows at Kunstverein München and Castillo/Corrales, Paris c/o Yale Union, Portland.
2018, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 19 x 12 cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$30.00 - In stock -
Rex Butler is one of Australia’s most significant critics. Double Displacement provides a comprehensive survey of Butler’s texts on art from Queensland. Collecting pieces on major contemporary artists such as Gordon Bennett, Tracey Moffatt, and Richard Bell, as well as reflection on historical figures like Ian Fairweather, the volume also contains a series of extended reviews of key events such as the Asia Pacific Triennial in which Butler attempts to come to terms with what, if anything, defines contemporary art. Ranging from newspaper reviews to densely argued philosophical investigations, the texts collected in Double Displacement are essential reading for anyone interested in the last three decades of Australian art.
Introduction by Helen Hughes and Francis Plagne.
2005, English
Softcover, 308 pages, 25 x 21 cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$45.00 - In stock -
Radical Revisionism is a sequel to What Is Appropriation?, also selected and edited by Rex Butler. Radical Revisionism gathers important recent writings on Australian art. These writings are ‘revisionist’ insofar as they seek to bring a series of present-day perspectives to the study of art of the past: feminism, post-colonialism, the overturning of the legal doctrine of terra nullius. Radical Revisionism asks: What is the proper role for art history? Is it merely to chronicle the truth of the past, or is it to actively intervene in the events it records? These questions obviously bear a relationship to the ‘history wars’ that raged throughout the 1990s in Australia. The anthology concludes by asking whether there can in fact be a history of ‘Australian’ art in which white and indigenous artists come together. It proposes that the twenty-first century will be characterised by a certain ‘unAustralian’ history of Australian art.
Radical Revisionism features a substantial introduction by Rex Butler and essays by Leonard Bell, Peter Beilharz, Tim Bonyhady, Kate Briggs, Keith Broadfoot, Ian Burn, Paul Carter, Brenda L. Croft, Mary Eagle,
Ross Gibson, Anne Gray, Richard Haese, Jeanette Hoorn, Joan Kerr, John Lechte, Nigel Lendon, Chris McAuliffe, Ian McLean, Charles Merewether, Catriona Moore, Djon Mundine, Ian North, Juliette Peers, Toni Ross, Bernard Smith, Virginia Spate, Ann Stephen, and Nicholas Thomas.
2001, English
Softcover (w. French flaps), 256 pages, 21.2 x 32 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Holzwarth / Berlin
$350.00 $150.00 - Out of stock
First, collectible edition. The result of a collaboration between the filmmaker Harmony Korine and the painter Christopher Wool, this series of experimental images tests the limits of the pictorial and the abstract, pushing the boundaries of visual and textual narrative to extremes. Korine’s photographs form the basis of an intense process of layering, drawing, overprinting and photocopying as each image is passed back and forth between the artists until the images are reduced to ghostly shadows beneath a barrage of scumbled dot-screens, random patterning and symbolic blurs and drips. Gradually the fragmented, distorted images serially mutate, attacked by a combination of mechanical and human processes, yet despite the violence exerted upon it, a vestige of narrative always survives.
Harmony Korine was born in Bolinas, California in 1974. At 19, he wrote the screenplay for Kids, directed by Larry Clark, and later wrote and directed Gummo, which won awards at the Venice and Rotterdam film festivals, and Julian Donkey-Boy, which won an award for best art direction at the Gijon International Film Festival in Spain. He is the author of the novel A Crack Up at the Race Riots.
Christopher Wool was born and brought up in Chicago. In the early 1970s he moved to New York, where he studied painting intermittently and worked as an assistant to the artist Joel Shapiro. His first show was at the Cable Gallery, New York, in 1984. Since then he has exhibited internationally, including the 1989 Whitney Biennial, Documenta9, Birth of the Cool, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Basel and the Secession Gallery in Vienna.
Very Good - Fine.
1974, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$35.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 edition of this collection of writings of Yves Klein, published by The Tate Gallery, on the occasion of an exhibition of the artist's work that same year. The catalogue includes an introduction by Michael Compton and writings by Klein (accompanied by photographs throughout), together with a Chronology and a Catalogue of the works in the exhibition.
Yves Klein (1928 – 1962) was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.
Ex-library copy with some internal stamps/marks not affecting content. Otherwise good throughout.
2013, English
Hardcover, 192 pages (104 colour, 53 b&w ill.), 30 x 24 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$98.00 $45.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Paul C. Ha. Text by Simon Baier, Yve-Alain Bois, Ann Lauterbach. Interview by Joao Ribas.
Cheyney Thompson has made the technology, production, and distribution of painting the subject of his work. He employs rational structures, technological processes, and generative devices as part of thinking through problems that organise themselves around the terms of painting.
Thompson's Chronochromes (2009-2011) are composed using the colour system devised by Albert H. Munsell in the early 1900s. He grafts this system on to a calendar: each day is assigned a complementary hue pair, with every hour changing the value, and every month changing the saturation, of each brushstroke.
Thompson depicts motifs drawn from a scan of the underlying canvas, merging digital reproduction with the materiality of painting. His use of a typology of canvas formats continues his engagement with the history of painting, from still life to the chromatic variation on a single motif.
2002, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 174 pages, 30 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Craftsman House / Victoria
$50.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Major hardcover monograph on Australian self-taught painter Elwyn Lynn, written by Peter Pinson. Profusely illustrated with Lynn's paintings executed over more than fifty years, many of which are reproduced here from private collections for the first time, the book chronologically surveys Lynn's work as Australia's foremost texture painter, as well as his work as an author and art critic. Includes biography, bibliography, catalogue and index. Lynn's use of unconventional painting media and expressive surfaces were "marked by an expressionist vehemence and a daring informality" that constructed metaphors for human suffering and endurance. Most of his work was essentially abstract, although a sense of the landscape is often evoked.
Elwyn (Jack) Lynn (6 November 1917 – 22 January 1997) was an Australian self-taught artist, author, art critic and curator. Lynn was trained as a teacher, and alongside his career as a painter, which started in the mid-1940s, Lynn was also an outspoken commentator on the visual arts. He was an art critic at The Australian for many years, editor of Quadrant and Art and Australia, and authored several books, including one about the artist Sir Sidney Nolan. Lynn was Curator of the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sydney University from 1969 to 1983, where he built up an international collection, now held within the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art. As an artist he participated in over 150 group exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Brazil, Indonesia, Poland and Germany. He had over 50 solo exhibitions in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Cologne (Germany).
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2018, English
Softcover (die-cut cover), 120 pages, 19.7 x 29.9 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$92.00 $50.00 - Out of stock
Featuring over 90 works by Alexander Calder (1898-1976) including paintings, mobiles, stabiles, jewellery, domestic objects and furniture, plus six monumental outdoor sculptures, this catalogue vividly illustrates a walkthrough of an ambitious exhibition in the British countryside in Somerset. Drawing a parallel with Calder’s long time home and studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, it includes many previously unseen works. An essay by Jessica Holmes focuses on the artist’s handcrafted domestic objects, offering insight into Calder’s life and inventive practice. Susan Braeuer Dam focuses on Calder’s move to Roxbury in 1933 and the shifts in his work drawing upon themes of nature, process and monumentality, specifically as related to the 1934 sculptures surveyed here.
2014, English
Hardcover, 144 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 27.5 x 26.5 cm
Published by
JRP Ringier / Zürich
$90.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Since the 1970s, in collaboration with renowned printers and publishers, Richard Tuttle has created a diverse printed oeuvre. In sensitively exploiting the unique possibilities of printmaking to make process, materials and actions visible, Tuttle explores the complexity of printmaking processes. "Prints" is the first monograph on Tuttle's printmaking. Edited by Christina von Rotenhan this publication introduces not only the artist's unique approach to printmaking with profound scholarly essays and catalogue entries for selected prints between 1973 and 2013, but also reveals Tuttle's deep interest in the collaborative nature of printmaking.
The timing of the publication is important as Richard Tuttle has also been invited to realize an installation in the Tate’s Turbine Hall. The large-scale installation will provide a powerful counterpoint to the more intimate works from his printed oeuvre.
Published with Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick.
1969, English
Softcover (11 loose postcards in illustrated card wallet), 16 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Pace / New York
$50.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 1969 exhibition edition published on the occasion of Nicholas Krushenick at Pace, New York, April 26 - May 21, 1969. This rare Krushenick catalogue comes in the form of 11 colour postcards, each reproducing a painting from the exhibition of the exhibition and housed in their original colour card wallet.
Nicholas Krushenick (May 31, 1929 – February 5, 1999) was an American abstract painter whose artistic style straddled the line between Op Art, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Color Field. He was active in the New York art scene in the 1960s and 1970s, before he withdrew and focused his time as a professor at the University of Maryland for almost thirty years until his death in 1999. Initially experimenting with a more Abstract Expressionist inspired style and cut paper collage, Krushenick is more well known for his paintings which use bold Liquitex colors and juxtaposing black lines, which fall under the category of pop abstraction. In fact, he is a singular figure within that style.
2015, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 22 x 25 cm
Published by
Aspen Art Museum / Aspen
$80.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Conversation between Hayley Tompkins and Heidi Zuckerman, Aspen, 2013. In an episode from May 2012 of the National Public Radio program “Radiolab,” linguist Guy Deutscher noted the seeming opposition between the absence in most ancient languages of a word for the color blue—it does not appear in the poetry of Homer, for instance—and “Why is the sky blue?,” is one of the first questions that all children ask. To better understand this odd contradiction, Deutscher undertook a personal experiment that included asking his wife to never tell their young daughter that the sky was blue. They introduced her to many colored objects, including blue ones, but when he eventually pointed to the sky and asked her what color it was, his query met with incomprehension. Although she eventually came to the conventional association of the word blue with the color of the sky, her initial uncertainty highlighted the difficulty in describing something that is essentially objectless. The poignancy of this initial moment when the sky could be any color led “Radiolab” cohost Robert Krulwich to posit that, in a way, assigning a specific color “… is a loss of innocence; having something fixed that is, for a while, just between you and your frenzied heart.” This linguistic experiment seems a fitting and beautiful metaphor for the work of Glasgow-based artist Hayley Tompkins.
This monograph presents five of Glaswegian artist Hayley Tompkins' (born 1971) major exhibitions from 2011 to 2013, including 'Scotland + Venice' and her show at Aspen Art Museum (both 2013), alongside recent works in her 'Digital Light Pool' series.
In her paintings and painted objects, Hayley Tompkins emphasizes the energy found in small things and economical gestures. From sticks and scraps of wood to spoons and mobile phone casings, her choice of support insistently draws attention to the boundary between painting and reality. Organized in suggestive and deceptively informal arrangements, Tompkins’s minimal, lo-fi objects highlight the acts of looking, touching, and experiencing space. In so doing, Tompkins prompts us to slow down and attend to our surroundings in a concentrated way that is decidedly at odds with the pace of contemporary life. Her exhibition at the AAM is her first solo presentation in a North American institution.
1991, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 79 pages, 35 x 27 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Ryoichi Sato / Tokyo
$90.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful over-sized hardcover monograph on the work of Frank Stella, published only in Japan in 1991. Lavishly illustrated throughout with countless works of Stella's, focussing particularly on his incredible works from the 1970s and 1980s that merge painting and sculpture into brightly coloured three-dimensional constructions. Adding this new, dynamic dimensionality to the painting, incorporating cast aluminium or sculpted fibreglass, each highly decorated or painted piece is set in relief - shadows and perforations become as much a part of the composition as colour and light. Idiosyncratic, unique, cosmopolitan with titles derived from literature or music or a geographical locale, the topographical nature of these works demonstrates what one writer called a “chaotic sea of images,” but it is within this chaos that Stella harnesses to serve steady invention. Beautiful large photographs, including great photographic imagery of Stella's studio and works in progress, along with an interview and biography to accompany the many large photographs.
2020, English / German
Softcover (dust-jacket), 600 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunstmuseum Den Haag / Netherlands
$110.00 - Out of stock
A 600-page compendium of paintings, sculptures and more from the beloved neoexpressionist polymath A.R. Penck. This elaborately designed volume features over 200 of A.R. Penck's (1939-2017) paintings, drawings and sculptures, some of them reproduced here for the first time. Together, they provide a retrospective of an artist who paved the way for a new concept of art in Germany after World War II. A. R. Penck – How it works’ is impressive proof that Penck was an artist who sought freedom and found it.
English and German text.
Accompanies the exhibition ‘A.R Penck’, 7 Apr -10 May 2020, Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
A.R. Penck, pseudonym of Ralf Winkler (Dresden, October 5, 1939 – Zurich, May 2, 2017), was a German painter, graphic artist, sculptor and jazz drummer. Penck was counted among the “De Nieuwe Wilden”, which included artists such as Georg Baselitz, Martin Kippenberger, Rainer Fetting, Jörg Immendorff and Markus Lüpertz. In the 1980s he gained worldwide fame with his paintings, which are based on pictograms, graffiti and primitive representations of human figures and totem-like shapes. Penck’s sculpture, although less known, shares the same primitive themes as his paintings and drawings. He often used everyday materials such as wood, bottles, cardboard boxes, cans, masking tape, aluminum foil, wire. The sculptures are coarse assemblies, roughly painted.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 26.7 x 22 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Mamco / Genève
WIELS / Brussels
$85.00 - Out of stock
This catalogue provides the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre, from the late 1970s until 1987, as well as more recent drawings and notes Daniëls has produced since 2007.
Including historic paintings as well as works never previously reproduced, this richly illustrated publication recounts the development of Daniëls’ visual language, while exploring the effects of repetition and variation inherent in his work.
A wide selection of drawings completes the presentation, offering a closer understanding of the evolution of his vocabulary.
Accompanies the exhibition René Daniëls: Fragments from an Unfinished Novel, 07 Sep 2018 – 06 Jan 2019, Wiels, Brussels and Feb- May 2019, MAMCO, Geneva.
1970, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 24 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ure Smith / Sydney
$20.00 - Out of stock
September 1970 issue of Art and Australia, featuring Ian Burn's "Conceptual Art as Art" article, alongside article on Stanislaus Rapotec, Colin Lanceley, Roger Kemp, the Venice Biennale (Michael Snow, Heinz Mack, Edward Ruscha, Gunter Uecker, Manuel Gómez Raba, etc.)
1978, Japanese
Softcover, 102 pages, 28 x 21 cm
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
$40.00 - Out of stock
Somewhere between Fiorucci and National Lampoon, Surprise House SUPER was a live-fast, die young quarterly magazine from art director Ryōichi Enomoto and published by the mighty Parco gallery, imprint and department-store-like-no-other in Tokyo. With the theme of "parody", SUPER was a spin-off from the subculture magazine "Surprise House", also published by Parco/Enomoto, showcasing the wildest reaches of graphic art cultural parody - this 1978 issue centering around the 2nd Japan Advertising Parody competition! Hosted by leading Japanese graphic artists Shigeo Fukuda, Kiyoshi Awazu, Yoshitaka Amano, Harumi Yamaguchi, and moderated by Enomoto, this issue presents the endless stream of hectic appropriated and reimagined commercial poster advertisements from Japan at the time. Plus much other photo montage, collage madness.
Very Good copy.
2019, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 30 pages, 20 x 20 cm
Published by
Printed Matter Inc. / New York
Primary Information / New York
$38.00 - In stock -
Originally published in 1971, Four Basic Kinds of Lines & Colour is a classic artist’s book by preeminent conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Featuring 34 pages of drawings, the work is an early example of LeWitt’s rigorous, algorithmic process in which a set of rules, applied to generate an image, are subsequently run through all of their permutations.
In the late 1960s LeWitt began applying this technique, first developed for his wall drawings, to 'artists’ books', a term that was coined two years after this book appeared. In this publication, LeWitt demonstrates the 34 ways that basic lines (horizontal, vertical, left-facing diagonal and right-facing diagonal) can be rendered in four colours (red, yellow, blue and black), with each page displaying a single combination (for example, horizontal lines in blue).
The book is one of LeWitt’s signature bookworks, which in its original edition remains quite scarce, so this new facsimile edition is significant; almost none, if any, of his books (he produced over 50) have been reprinted.
2020, English
Softcover, 182 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Published by
Forma Edizioni / Firenze
$105.00 - Out of stock
This English-edition exhibition catalogue on the pioneering, avant-garde Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915-1995), whose work famously blurred the boundaries of painting and relief sculpture, documents a comprehensive retrospective at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. It aims to reconstruct the full trajectory of his career, and addresses the transformative ways that he turned material into art. Nearly 50 works selected from each phase of his career are represented, including the rarely exhibited Catrami (tars), Muffe (molds), Sacchi (sacks), Combustioni (combustions), Legni (woods), Plastiche (plastics), Cretti, and Cellotex series.The show was curated by the art historian and president of the Fondazione Burri, Bruno Cora, with critical essays by Cora and the director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Luca Massimo Barbero.
Alberto Burri (12 March 1915 – 13 February 1995) was an Italian abstract painter considered a key figure in Post-War European art. Associated with the Arte Povera movement, he is perhaps best known for his sacchi (“sacks”) series, wherein he stitched, patched, and painted on rough burlap bags. Born on March 12, 1915 in Citta di Castello, Italy, he studied medicine before serving in Mussolini’s army during World War II as a doctor. Captured in Tunisia, Burri was interned at Camp Howze in Texas as a prisoner of war, where he began painting on readily available discarded burlap. After his release in 1946, he moved to Rome where his art practice turned towards abstraction. His interest in non-traditional materials continued with experiments using wood, tar, plastic, zinc oxide, pumice, PVC adhesives, and fabric. In one of his very rare statements, Burri claimed that the critics’ words, as well as his own, were of no use in offering a description of his artworks, affirming that its only real key strength was the formal balance that poor and industrial materials were surprisingly able to give.
1994, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 150 pages, 23 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sezon Museum of Art / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this scarce, heavily-illustrated Japanese catalogue on the work of pioneer American sculptor David Smith, published on the occasion of an major survey exhibition at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan, in 1994.
Broken into the sections: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings, each profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with Smith's prolific and diverse work spanning his entire career. This rare volume also features texts in both Japanese and English, including David Smith's "Questions to Art Students", a foreward by Peter Stevens, and a full biography, bibliography and list of exhibitions (all in English).
Among the greatest American sculptors of the twentieth century, David Smith was the first to work with welded metal. He wove a rich mythology around this rugged work, often talking of the formative experiences he had in his youth while working in a car body workshop. Yet this only disguised a brilliant mind that fruitfully combined a range of influences from European modernism including Cubism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. It also concealed the motivations of a somewhat private man whose art was marked by expressions of trauma. Smith was close to painters such as Robert Motherwell, and in many respects he translated the painterly concerns of the Abstract Expressionists into sculpture. But far from being a follower, his achievement in sculpture was distinctive and influential. He brought qualities of industrial manufacturing into the language of art and proved to be an important influence on Minimalism.
Very Good copy with with original obi-strip and dust jacket. Tanning to edges, light wear.