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 (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$85.00 $70.00 - Out of stock
The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.
With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.
2020, English
Hardcover, 368 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid
$50.00 - Out of stock
Drawings by Francisco de Goya presents the fruits of the research undertaken for the publication of a new catalogue raisonné of Goya’s drawings, a subject to which the Museo del Prado has always devoted particular attention and which is one of the keystones of its collection. Since the publication of Gassier’s catalogue in 1973 the number of drawings attributed to Goya has changed, giving rise to the need for a new catalogue raisonné which updates the enormous body of information accumulated over the course of two centuries of literature on this subject.
This book brings together more than 100 drawings by Goya from the Prado’s own collections and from public and private ones around the world. It is presented as a chronological survey of his work that includes drawings from throughout his career, ranging from the Italian Sketchbook to the Bordeaux Albums. It also offers an up-to-date vision of the ideas that recurrently appear in Goya’s work, revealing the ongoing and long-lasting relevance of his thinking.
1976, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 72 pages, 24 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Filipacchi / Paris
$120.00 - Out of stock
First 1976 hardcover English-edition of the great Editions Filipacchi monograph on artist Dorothea Tanning. Profusely illustrated with Tanning's incredible paintings in colour and b/w, accompanied by photography, biography and texts in English by author Gilles Plazy.
Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) was born in the United States in the town of Galesburg, Illinois to Swedish émigré parents. Largely self-taught as an artist, Tanning moved to New York in 1935 where she began working as a freelance illustrator, creating advertisement designs for Macy’s department store and other clients. In 1936 she visited the ground-breaking MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Surrealism had a profound effect on her. Travelling to France in July 1939, she found a country on the brink of war and Paris empty of the artists with whom she had hoped to be acquainted. Refugees from Nazi occupied France, she would meet the surrealists back in New York through her first art dealer, Julien Levy. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. In a double wedding with artist Man Ray and dancer Juliet P. Browner, Tanning and Ernst married in October 1946. They would have 34 years together, moving to the town of Sedona, Arizona, to build a house set within a group of huge red rocks in the Verde Valley. Sedona captivated Tanning’s imagination. Here she would continue to write and paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out. By 1956 Max and Dorothea had moved to France. Around 1955 Tanning’s paintings moved away from meticulously rendered figurative dreamscapes, increasingly employing confident gestural flow and movement in the wake of her work as a costume and stage designer for the ballets of the Russian choreographer George Blanchine – Night Shadow (1946), The Witch (1950) and Bayou (1952). In the late 1960s Tanning’s practice shifted once again, moving from drawing, design and painting to three-dimensional sculptural works fashioned from soft textiles and found items. When Ernst died in Paris in 1976, Tanning was bereft. ‘There is no light in the studio,’ she wrote, ‘nothing moves and the colored jokes are fading fast. The disorder is grievous. (Is the heart condemned to break each day?)'. In 1979 Tanning began her return to New York, where she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm. Tanning died in New York on 21 January 2012, aged 101.
1966, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 26.5 x 21.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jean-Jacques Pauvert / Paris
$70.00 - Out of stock
First 1966 hardcover edition of this early comprehensive French monograph on artist Dorothea Tanning, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert in Paris. Profusely illustrated with Tanning's incredible paintings in colour and b/w, accompanied by extensive texts (in French) by poet and critic Alain Bosquet.
Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) was born in the United States in the town of Galesburg, Illinois to Swedish émigré parents. Largely self-taught as an artist, Tanning moved to New York in 1935 where she began working as a freelance illustrator, creating advertisement designs for Macy’s department store and other clients. In 1936 she visited the ground-breaking MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Surrealism had a profound effect on her. Travelling to France in July 1939, she found a country on the brink of war and Paris empty of the artists with whom she had hoped to be acquainted. Refugees from Nazi occupied France, she would meet the surrealists back in New York through her first art dealer, Julien Levy. Late in 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio, saw a painting, (Birthday), and stayed to play chess. In a double wedding with artist Man Ray and dancer Juliet P. Browner, Tanning and Ernst married in October 1946. They would have 34 years together, moving to the town of Sedona, Arizona, to build a house set within a group of huge red rocks in the Verde Valley. Sedona captivated Tanning’s imagination. Here she would continue to write and paint her enigmatic versions of life on the inside, looking out. By 1956 Max and Dorothea had moved to France. Around 1955 Tanning’s paintings moved away from meticulously rendered figurative dreamscapes, increasingly employing confident gestural flow and movement in the wake of her work as a costume and stage designer for the ballets of the Russian choreographer George Blanchine – Night Shadow (1946), The Witch (1950) and Bayou (1952). In the late 1960s Tanning’s practice shifted once again, moving from drawing, design and painting to three-dimensional sculptural works fashioned from soft textiles and found items. When Ernst died in Paris in 1976, Tanning was bereft. ‘There is no light in the studio,’ she wrote, ‘nothing moves and the colored jokes are fading fast. The disorder is grievous. (Is the heart condemned to break each day?)'. In 1979 Tanning began her return to New York, where she gave full rein to her long felt compulsion to write. Her published works include two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives, a collection of poems, A Table of Content, and a novel, Chasm. Tanning died in New York on 21 January 2012, aged 101.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 80 pages, 22 x 26 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Seibu / Tokyo
Shizenkan / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
One of the finest, rarely seen books on Allen Jones, published in Japan in 1974 on the occasion of a Japanese exhibition in that travelled across Tokyo (at Seibu) and Nagoya (at Meitetsu), the same year. Densely packed, this book is profusely illustrated in colour and black and white with Jones' drawings, painting, sculptures, designs, posters, prints, book editions, lithographic set editions, photographs of the artist's studio (by Tim Street-Porter and Yoshio Marumoto), an interview, biography, and bibliography.
Edited by Allen Jones and Yoshio Marumoto.
1969, English
Softcover, 90 pages, 23 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Galerie Mikro & Edizioni 0 / Milan
$65.00 - Out of stock
One of the finest of Allen Jones' artist books, "Figures" was published in 1969 in Berlin and Milan. Designed by Jones himself, with Anthony Marshall, this over-sized colourful "scrapbook" compiles a collection of found images from pin-up magazines, fashion advertising, film promos, giving way to images of the artist's work - both paintings, drawings and his famous sculpture-furniture, concluding with a unique four b&w pages of (other) "Artist's Advertisements" (including H.C. Westermann, Kenneth Price, Tom Wesselmann, Pablo Picasso), and business "calling card" acknowledgements.
Allen Jones (b. 1 September 1937) is a British pop artist, best known for his sculptures, paintings, drawings, and work in set and costume design for film and theatre.
Jones' exhibitions of erotic sculptures, such as the set Chair, Table and Hat Stand (1969), are studies in forniphilia, which turn women into items of human furniture. Much of his work draws on the imagery of rubber fetishism and BDSM. The sculptures in the Korova Milk Bar from the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange were based on works by Jones after he turned down the request by Stanley Kubrick to design the set for no payment. Jones designed Barbet Schroeder's 1976 film Maîtresse.
Good copy but with age tanning (most common with this title) and old spotting to pages.
2008, English
Softcover, 80 pages
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$20.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published to accompany the survey exhibition Diena Georgetti: The Humanity of Abstract Painting 1988-2008 at the IMA Brisbane, 2008.
"The work of Diena Georgetti is enigmatic and elusive. The artist achieved considerable critical acclaim when her blackboard paintings were first shown in 1989 at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, and subsequently at the 1992 Biennale of Sydney. Soon after, her work took an abrupt turn, as she followed up with a series of orientalist paintings, marked by their modest scale, allegorical possibility, and psychological intensity. More recently, she has been producing works co-opting early modernist styles to new ends. Georgetti grew up in Brisbane, where she continues to live and work, with a decade spent in Melbourne from 1989 to 2000. Her work has been exhibited regularly inAustralia and New Zealand. Few people however, have had the opportunity to see the scope of her work, to follow the subtle shifts in her project. In 1993 Judith Pascale wrote that Georgetti’s art was better understood by friends and colleagues than art world professionals, and this still largely holds true. But we hope this may be addressed by our exhibition, Diena Georgetti: The Humanity of Abstract Painting 1988-2008, which surveys two decades of work allowing us to take stock of its breadth and development and to
grant the artist overdue recognition."
As New. All copies had bad binding.
2010, English
Softcover, 40 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Douglas Stewart Fine Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
Published by Douglas Stewart Fine Books in 2010, this publication catalogues, as the title suggests, Australian artist Robert Jacks's archive of books, printed works, folios and ephemera - a central component of his practice. Compiled entirely from the artist’s collection and spanning 1969 – 2009, it forms an authoritative, fully illustrated listing of publications and works from the prolific Australian artist.
Robert Jacks (born 1943) is an Australian painter, sculptor and printmaker.
In 1966 he had his first solo exhibition at Gallery A, Melbourne from which a work was purchased for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1968, he participated in ‘The Field’ an extremely influential exhibition at the new National Gallery of Victoria, which effectively launched colour field abstraction in Australia.
"I think my work has always been minimal and abstract because when I was being taught sculpture, it was expressed in abstract terms. Form in space, mass and volume - that sort of thing. Painting, for me, is an extension of sculptural ideas."
1990, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Melbourne / Melbourne
$25.00 - Out of stock
Published by the University of Melbourne in 1990, this catalogue celebrates Australian artist Robert Jacks's commitment to abstraction as well as his works' "authority and formal quality, suggestive colours and sensitivity". Forward by Frances Lindsay, expansive text by Simeon Kronenberg, written in 1989. Illustrated throughout (in colour and b&w) with Jacks' many works on paper using pencil, watercolour, gouache, collage, cut paper, stamps and ink. Includes biography and exhibition history.
Robert Jacks (born 1943) is an Australian painter, sculptor and printmaker.
In 1966 he had his first solo exhibition at Gallery A, Melbourne from which a work was purchased for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1968, he participated in ‘The Field’ an extremely influential exhibition at the new National Gallery of Victoria, which effectively launched colour field abstraction in Australia.
"I think my work has always been minimal and abstract because when I was being taught sculpture, it was expressed in abstract terms. Form in space, mass and volume - that sort of thing. Painting, for me, is an extension of sculptural ideas."
2014, English
Softcover, 49 pages, 29 x 29 cm
Edition of 500,
Published by
Dépendance / Brussels
$65.00 - Out of stock
Large format catalogue published by Dépendance, Brussels, on the occasion of Merlin Carpenter's solo exhibition "POLICE", in 2013. Monochromatic Police-blue printing throughout, illustrating Carpenter's paintings, installation, ephemera, and other various photographs, alongside a text by Peter Wächtler and poem by Carpenter entitled "GLOBOCOP ROLE".
Designed by Non-Format.
Published in an edition of 500 copies.
2017, English / German
Softcover, 144 pages, 24.5 x 28.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$72.00 $59.00 - In stock -
Edited by Kunsthalle Bern
Texts by Valérie Knoll, Sam Lewitt
Merlin Carpenter’s 2015 exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled the Kunsthalle Bern’s seven rooms with twenty-two transit blankets hung on the wall, pulled like canvas around identically scaled stretcher frames. The transit blankets are the kind used to pack fragile goods. Inexpensive and disposable, they are manufactured from recycled materials, compressed into an insulating sheet used to preserve prized surfaces and materials more valuable than themselves. Each work in the show was post-dated to 2016, despite the exhibition’s opening date in September of the previous year. The works were titled after one of the Shepperton-based artist’s seven galleries, and were prominently displayed as “not for sale.”
The transit-blanket works are documented in the second half of this publication, the cover of which is embossed with each location of Carpenter’s seven galleries—New York, London, Los Angeles, Brussels, Berlin, Miami, Lisboa/Porto. The first half is composed of a black-and-white image feed, resembling collaged photocopies, of photos of the show’s installation, related gallery shows, and billboards advertising the show that displayed classic mid-to-late century consumer goods.
In addition, texts by Kunsthalle Bern director Valérie Knoll and artist Sam Lewitt examine the materiality of Carpenter’s works, the particular mix of playfulness and earnestness in his artistic output, and how the “paintings” thematize the limbo of the “midcareer” artist as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.
Design by Non-Format
2003, English
Softcover, 140 pages (b/w ill.), 21 by 29.8 cm
Published by
Self-Published
$30.00 - In stock -
Publication of artist pages curated by Stephen Bram & Justin Andrews, including the work of;
Justin Andrews
Stephen Bram
Daniel Gottin
Melinda Harper
Monika Kapfer
Karin Lind
Hermann Maier Neustadt
John Nixon
Rose Nolan
Karim Noureldin
Kerrie Poliness
Sandra Selig
Carmen Soraya
Ralf Werner
Ian Whittlesea
2004, English
Softcover, 104 pages (b/w ill.), 21 by 29.8 cm
Published by
Self-Published
$30.00 - In stock -
Publication of artist pages curated by Stephen Bram & Justin Andrews, including the work of;
Florian Balze
Renate Buser
Tom Fruchtl
Esther Hiepler
Kyle Jenkins
Gerard Kodde
W.J.M. Kok
Gerold Miller
Jan van der Ploeg
Masato Takasaka
Kees Visser
Albert Weis
2008, English
Softcover, 66 pages, 21 x 21 cm
Published by
Griffith University / Brisbane
$32.00 - Out of stock
Publication celebrating Warlpiri legend, Darby Jampijinpa Ross (1905-2005) from Yuendumu. Published by Griffith Artworks in partnership with Warlukurlangu Artists to accompany an exhibition curated by SP Wright. Illustrated throughout with Darby Jampijinpa Ross's paintings, alongside a biography and texts by SP Wright and Liam Campbell.
A senior and respected figure both in Warlpiri ceremonial life and in the art movement at Yuendumu. Darby Jampijinpa Ross was born at Ngarilyikirlangu, north of the present day site of Yuendumu, in about 1910. His main totems are Emu and Bandicoot, and he usually paints Ngapa (Water), Yankirri (Emu) and Wardilyka (Bush Turkey) Dreamings, though he has also painted the Pamapardu (Flying Ant) Dreaming which passes close to Yuendumu travelling west. Darby’s family has responsibility for the Dreaming as it crosses Warlpiri country. Darby has been an active member of the painting group at Yuendumu since the early years as one of the group of senior men of the Yuendumu community who painted the 27 doors of the Yuendumu School with their Dreamings. Since the Yuendumu painting company’s first Araluen Centre exhibition in October 1985, his works have been included in numerous exhibitions of Warlukurlangu Artists in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin, Alice Springs and the Gold Coast. Like most artists of the Western Desert – or anywhere else, Darby Ross has progressively refined his approach to and execution of his subject matter, yet his paintings have retained their distinctive early style of loose exuberant paintwork and complex, richly textured surfaces, sometimes strongly reminiscent of cave paintings from the Western Desert area. Darby’s work has been included in the Dreamings:Art of Aboriginal Australia exhibition which toured North America in 1988-9, the Mythscapes exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1989 and many other important national and international exhibitions since.
2014, English / Dutch
Softcover (w. staple bound insert), 288 pages, 24 x 28 cm
Published by
WIELS / Brussels
$93.00 - Out of stock
This dense and comprehensive catalogue for a retrospective exhibition of the work of Walter Swennen at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre offers a detailed look at the Belgian artist’s oeuvre, delving into its humorous interaction between pictorial practice and poetical communication. With sources of inspiration ranging from comic strips and children’s drawings to ads and world literature, Swennen shows a preference for subtle forms of rebellion, deviation and questioning authorship and originality. Besides documentation of numerous works, the book includes a selection of the artist’s published texts, plus essays by Caroline Dumalin and Quinn Latimer, among others.
2014, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 12 x 18 cm
Published by
Xavier Hufkens / Brussels
$44.00 - Out of stock
Walter Swennen started his artistic life as a poet, but switched to painting as his primary means of expression in the early 1980s. Although his oeuvre varies greatly in scale, style, and materials, it can be seen as an ongoing exploration into the nature, potentialities, and limitations of painting, the fundamental question of what subject matter to choose, and how to depict it. Swennen is recognised for his experimental and associative approach to painting, in which meanings perpetually float and shift across images that recall a familiar place or situation – a place where something has happened.
This compact but dense catalogue published by Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, is filled with Swennen's wonderful works on paper. Published on the occasion of an exhibition of Works on Paper in 2014-2015 at the gallery.
2017, English / German / Portuguese
Softcover, 152 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art / Porto
$42.00 - Out of stock
Exploring the continual exhaustion, withdrawal, engagement and renewal of painting, the work of Michael Krebber is a central reference in conversations about the mediumʼs continued relevance.
The large selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures featured in this two-volume publication showcases Krebber’s practice over the last three decades.
Stations in a recursive cycle of starts, fits and restarts, scattered in a variety of motifs and gestures, by turns emphatic, arresting or ironic together they trace the artistʼs approach to painting, its expressive language as well as its critical function.
Volume 1 of 2.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Michael Krebber: The Living Wedge at Fundação De Serralves, Porto, Portugal (15 October 2016 – 15 January 2017) and at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (18 February – 30 April 2017).
English, German and Portuguese text.
2017, English / German / Portuguese
Softcover, 160 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art / Porto
$42.00 - In stock -
Exploring the continual exhaustion, withdrawal, engagement and renewal of painting, the work of Michael Krebber is a central reference in conversations about the mediumʼs continued relevance.
The large selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures featured in this two-volume publication showcases Krebberʼs practice over the last three decades.
Stations in a recursive cycle of starts, fits and restarts, scattered in a variety of motifs and gestures, by turns emphatic, arresting or ironic together they trace the artistʼs approach to painting, its expressive language as well as its critical function.
Volume 2 of 2
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Michael Krebber: The Living Wedge at Fundação De Serralves, Porto, Portugal (15 October 2016 – 15 January 2017) and at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (18 February – 30 April 2017).
English, German and Portuguese text.
2008, English / German
Softcover, 89 pages, 17.7 x 12.9 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Galerie Buchholz / Köln
$34.00 - Out of stock
This publication documents German artist Michael Krebber's "Puberty in Painting" painting series from 2008. The paintings were exhibited over three separate galleries, in three different cities: Galerie Buchholz, Cologne; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Maureen Paley, London.
Designed by Michael Krebber and Yvonne Quirmbach in a limited edition of 1000.
2017, English
Hardcover, 328 pages, 16.4 x 22.6cm
Published by
Swiss Institute / New York
Walther König / Köln
$59.00 - Out of stock
Blurring the lines between artist's book and monograph, this volume is the only one in English on Niele Toroni and the most comprehensive in print, relentlessly documenting nearly five decades of his exhibitions. Part of a generation of artists who transformed our understanding of painting, Toroni has applied a paint-covered no. 50 brush at regular intervals of 30 cm to a variety of surfaces since 1966. With each brushstroke he encapsulates the fullness of the human touch without leaving an emotive record. Both irreverent and sublime, his travail/peinture ("work/painting") repeats itself in an eternal recommencement. "You can look at the ocean every day," Toroni reminds us, "but it is never the same sea."
2003, English
Softcover, 632 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$130.00 - In stock -
Eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years, each looking at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions.
Some critics view the postwar avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most insightful art critics and theoreticians of recent decades, argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.This collection contains eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years. Each looks at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. The art movements covered include Nouveau Realisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villegle) art in postwar Germany (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and pop art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham). Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); or he addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman). One of the book's strengths is its systematic, interconnected account of the key issues of American and European artistic practice during two decades of postwar art. Another is Buchloh's method, which integrates formalist and socio-historical approaches specific to each subject.
2002, English / German
Softcover, 68 pages, 22 x 27 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$35.00 - Out of stock
The Best Book About Pessimism I Ever Read, a group exhibition curated by Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie at Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2002, builds a bridge between international artists to create a forum in which subject areas such as "content as a metaphor for meaning", "pictoriality as a medium for the concept" and "negation through representation" are up for discussion. Features the work os John Byrne, Bonnie Camplin, Enrico David, Keith Farquhar, Alasdair Gray, Ronnie Heeps, Paulina Olowska, Mathilde Rosier, Lucy Skaer, Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan. All works and installation views are documented here with media spanning drawing, embroidery, painting, illustration, literature, film, video, sculpture and spatial installation. Includes bios, texts by Lucy McKenzie, Karola Grässlin, Andrea Kusel and Neil Mulholland.
2020, Softcover, 68 pages, 20 x 15 cm
Edition of 100
Published by
Tutto / Naarm—Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Working from NIAD Art Centre in Richmond, California, artist Karen May has been creating drawings on top of ArtForum advertisements over the past several years. This inaugural publication from TUTTO gathers 57 of these détournements made from 2015–2019.
Let it be a book documents May’s freewheeling linework and prowess as a draftsperson whilst simultaneously surveying and hijacking the contemporary art world.
Edition of 100
2010, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$49.00 - Out of stock
Duchamp's famous last artwork, seen not as a summation of his work but as an invitation to endless interpretation.
Following Marcel Duchamp's death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art stunned the art world by unveiling a project on which he had been working secretly for twenty years, long after he had supposedly given up art for chess. Installed by the museum curators with the assistance of Duchamp's widow Teeny and stepson Paul Matisse, Étant donnés (known in English as Given, or, literally, “being given”) consists of a small room with a locked wooden door; through a peephole can be seen a landscape of trees, with a naked female figure at the front, her arm outstretched, holding a lamp. In this illustrated study, Julian Haladyn argues that Duchamp's intention in this final piece was similar to Raymond Roussel's in How I Wrote Certain of My Books: not, as many have maintained, to provide a neat summation of his career, but the opposite—to open his artwork (which he had made sure was fully represented in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection) to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Duchamp's engagement with his legacy (by orchestrating first the purchase of his work and then the donation of those purchases to the museum) is a significant historical development in the critical relationship between artists and the institution of art—a relationship that would later be further explored by such artists as Andrea Fraser and Michael Asher. Additionally, Haladyn sees that the staging of Étant donnés—especially the way that Duchamp forces viewers to become aware of the act of looking and their bodily presence in the gallery space—foreshadowed strategies used by Minimalism as well as installation, spectatorship, and institutional critique.
About the author:
Julian Jason Haladyn is a writer and artist based in Canada. He teaches at the University of Western Ontario.