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.
1992, English
Softcover, 70 pages, 30 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Matthew Marks / New York
$200.00 - Out of stock
First collectable edition of Ellsworth Kelly's Plant Drawings, published in 1992 to accompany Kelly's first solo exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, Plant Drawings, New York that year. Long out of print and re-editioned multiple times, "Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings" features 30 plates of drawings made by Kelly between 1960 and 1992, this edition with the text by John Ashbery. Kelly made these gorgeously economical line drawings from life, sometimes barely lifting the pencil as he translated each plant’s contours to paper. Focusing on direct visual impression—“nothing is changed or added,” as he put it—Kelly used the natural forms of the plants to explore some of his painterly fixations, like the effects of volume, negative space and overlapping planes. Despite the immediacy of their execution and their representational content, the most striking surprise of Kelly’s plant drawings is how much they share with his abstract paintings and sculptures.
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
Very Good copy with light edge wear/toning.
2006, English
Softcover, 375 pages, 35 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
CAPC / Bordeaux
Sculpture Centre / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Over-sized, long out-of-print Grey Flags catalogue edited by Bettina Funcke, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name curated by Anthony Huberman and Paul Pfeiffer. Comprised of nineteen artists with significant individual differences, Grey Flags assembles a group of works that not only resist categorical branding, but also go on in different ways to challenge the very terms of the "arts-apparatus." The exhibition featured the work of John Armleder, Lutz Bacher, Helen Chadwick, Tacita Dean, Claire Fontaine, Liam Gillick, Piero Golia, Michael Krebber, Jonathan Monk, Gabriel Orozco, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad, Allen Ruppersberg, Seth Price, Wilhelm Sasnal, Karin Schneider, Shirana Shahbazi, Kelley Walker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mario Ybarra Jr. and the 375 page exhibition catalogue compiled a sort-of reader/scrap book of bootlegged pages from other catalogues and zines, artworks, text excerpts etc. contributed by all involved. A unique and fascinating catalogue.
"When you stop talking and doing, and close your eyes, what comes to mind? Voices? Images? Feelings? Like landscape seen from a plane, these phenomena hover on a sublime verge between fascinating and boring. Well, that might be true of anything viewed from a distance: the stars, the sea, mountains, the horizon. And what of social phenomena? Same. On any forgotten record, it's in the filler songs that you find the blank, thoughtless strivings laid bare, production patterns of another day, secrets of the ornaments. [...]" - Seth Price
Fine copy, with light shelf wear.
1974, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 18.5 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Gallery of New South Wales / Sydney
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales / NSW
$28.00 - Out of stock
Scarce exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Two masters of the Weimar Bauhaus: Lyonel Feininger, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack", held at the AGNSW and NGV in 1974, and published by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Compiled, designed and introduced by organiser Nicholas Draffin, with additional text by Lyonel Feininger. Illustrated throughout with examples of works in colour and bw by both Lyonel Feininger and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, with detailed captions in English, including collections. Also features a brief bibliography.
Lyonel Charles Feininger (1871–1956) was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a successful caricaturist and comic strip artist, working regularly for magazines and newspapers in the USA and Germany. He was born and grew up in New York City, traveling to Germany at 16 to study. At the age of 36, he started to work as a fine artist. He was a member of the Berliner Sezession in 1909, and he was associated with German expressionist groups: Die Brücke, the Novembergruppe, Gruppe 1919, the Blaue Reiter circle and Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Germany in 1919, Feininger was his first faculty appointment, and became the master artist in charge of the printmaking workshop. He taught at the Bauhaus for several years. He also produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid 1950s, but he kept these primarily within his circle of friends. He was also a pianist and composer, with several piano compositions and fugues for organ extant.
Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (1893-1965) was a German/Australian artist. His formative education was 1912–1914 at Debschitz art school in Munich. He studied at the Bauhaus from 1919 - 1924 and remained working there until 1926 where, along with Kurt Schwerdtfege, he further developed the Farblichtspiele ('coloured-light-plays'), which used a projection device to produced moving colours on a transparent screen accompanied by music composed by Hirschfeld Mack. It is now regarded as an early form of multimedia. Music and colour theory remained lifelong interests, informing his art work in a number of media, and it was the inspiration for his well-respected and influential teaching.
Good copy with two internal library stickers not affecting contents.
2019, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$82.00 $35.00 - Out of stock
In the 1980s, Ursula Hauser began quietly building what’s become one of the world’s most impressive private collections of modern and contemporary art—acquiring works from visionary artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Carol Rama, Alina Szapocznikow, Franz West, Eva Hesse, Francis Picabia, Lee Lozano, and many others—and in 1992, she co-founded one of today’s most important galleries, Hauser & Wirth. This book presents the first-ever extensive and intimate account of her life and art collection.
To define the works found in Ursula’s collection is a matter of identity, one that is fused to her personal trajectory—from her early years in eastern Switzerland, where she was born in 1939, to becoming a mother, helming her father’s intrepid electronics business, and starting an art gallery with her daughter and son-in-law. Family has always been the steady axis around which Ursula’s life orbits; for her, the artists she collects belong to that same magnetic locus. To understand Ursula Hauser’s collection is to know the collector and chart the course of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century art.
Edited by Laura Bechter and Michaela Unterdörfer
1990, Serbian
Softcover, 188 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Museum of Contemporary Art / Belgrade
$80.00 - Out of stock
Long out of print, this is the only monograph on the wonderful work of Serbian surrealist Vane Bor (Stevan Živadinović), published as a comprehensive catalogue to accompany the retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, 1990. Profusely illustrated throughout with Bor's collages, paintings, photograms, and photographs, alongside texts and poems by himself and contributors. Also a full biography, personal photographs, exhibition history, bibliography, etc. Texts in Serbian.
Vane Bor (Stevan Živadinović) (1908, Bor – 1993, Oxford) was one of the most important members of the Serbian surrealist movement. He is the creator of a number of collages, photograms, photographs, theoretical texts, paintings and poems. He was born in the mining village of Bor, from which he took his pseudonym. In 1926, as a law student in Paris, Vane Bor socialized with surrealists, and a year later his first collages and photo-montages were created. While his collages reflected playfulness and wit, reduced material and the atmosphere of insecurity in his photo-montages captured a multilayered aura of dreams and memories. Many of his works reflected interest in avant-garde film, while Bor himself considered photo-montages a form of static film. His work was published in important articles in L'Impossible and Revue du Cinéma, and in 1930 Bor co-signed the Surrealist Manifesto. Jean-Paul Dreyfus in the Parisian journal “Revue du cinéma" dedicated his critique of Fritz Lang's film to Bor. Bor's photographs, just like his photograms created during 1928 – 1936, were characterized by interplays and simulations of movement and the passage of time. These achievements were made through careful editing, rather than the automatism that was characteristic of Surrealism, often using fragments of broken glass. At the beginning of the thirties Bor worked for the magazine "Surrealism Here and Now" and in 1932 with Ristic published the book Anti-wall . A year later the Parisien journal “Le surréalisme au service de la Revolution” published Bor's private letter addressed to Salvador Dali, whom Bor met in 1931. During the thirties he published articles on psychoanalysis and film in the magazines "Danas / Today" and "Politika / Politics". As a doctor of science Bor was appointed lecturer at the Law Faculty in Subotica. In 1936 he filmed a documentary about Belgrade. During the period between 1938 – 1941 Bor worked as an assistant professor at the Law Faculty in Belgrade. In 1944 Bor left the country illegally and moved to London where he created a cycle of collages. During the sixties in London, Bor created a series of surrealist paintings from non-painterly materials. 1966 Becomes a member of the Free Painters and Sculptors Association in London. In 1984 he became a member of Oxford University Geological Society and the University Anthropological Society. Vane's archive, four crates of books, photographs, writings and other works, was halved, lost by the carelessness of a cleaner in a 1986 London warehouse. In 1990 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade organised a retrospective exhibition of his work. He died in Oxford on May 6, 1993.
Fine copy.
1945, Italian
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 230 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Edizioni del Milione / Milan
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1945 hardcover edition of the first complete monographic study on the work of Carlo Carrà by Guglielmo Pacchioni, published by Edizioni del Milione in Milan. The book's initial print run was entirely destroyed in the 1943 Milan air raids. Already fully printed and ready to pass to the binder in the Esperia, even the zincs of the black plates were destroyed. With only the four-colour processes remaining the book had to be completely rebuilt in the most difficult years of the war, coming to light in December 1945 in this expanded first surviving edition. Guglielmo Pacchioni organised the book as an illustrated catalogue to accompany an exhibition of Carrà on the initiative of the Center of Action for the Arts, at Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan in 1942, and then expanded it into this critical revision of his entire pictorial activity. Here Carlo Carrà has been studied and framed in Italian and European painting of the last fifty years and has found in Guglielmo Pacchioni his first historian, who examines the developments of the artist in an organic way and with scientific rigour. Opening with 35 pages of text, supplemented by 2 pages of biographical information and 14 pages of bibliography; followed by a catalogue of important works. Profusely illustrated with 75 colour and bw plates of Carrà's paintings, as well as reproducing 15 two-colour designs of the artist to round out this generous volume of Carrà's most important works.
Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. Born in Piedmont, Carrà worked as a decorator and muralist after moving to Milan in 1895, where he later met Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo. Like them, he experimented with Divisionism, but was dissatisfied with current trends in painting, and in 1910 signed the ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’ and the ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’. Carrà's painting has also had periods of direct association with Cubism and Metaphysical painting, paving the way for the consciously naïve figurative style he went on to develop. During the mid-1920s he adopted a naturalistic approach to landscape painting that he explored for the remainder of his career. In addition to his many paintings, Carrà published a number of poetic books concerning painting, and for many years was the art critic of the influential Milanese newspaper L’Ambrosiano. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.
Good copy throughout with some tanning and scattered light age spotting generally not affecting contents. Tightly bound and very scarce copy with original colour plated dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
1954, English / French / German
Hardcover, 240 pages, 30 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
William Heinemann / London
$75.00 - Out of stock
First buckram-bound edition of the oversized 8 European Artists published in 1954 by William Heinemann, London, Sydney, Toronto. Felix H. Man's photo documentary on eight masters of Modern Art: Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Graham Sutherland. Each artist is represented through generous chapters made up of varying paper stocks of vivid kodachrome photographs 9colour and b/w) of the artist's at work in their studios, original contributions from each artist in the form of a drawing and a handwritten text reproduced in facsimile with translations, and a chronological biography. Photographs, foreword and book design by Felix H. Man; introductions by Graham Greene and Jean Cassou. Texts in English, French, German.
Hans Felix Sigismund Baumann aka Felix H. Man (1893 – 1985) was a leading pioneer photojournalist and later an art collector.
Good-VG oversized buckram bound edition, light ageing/buckling, otherwise tight and clean throughout.
2009, Czech
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 54 pages, 24 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie výtvarného umění v Náchodě / Brode
$65.00 - Out of stock
Lovely, scarce, limited edition Jana Švábová catalogue published in 2009 by Galerie výtvarného umění v Náchodě, seemingly the only publication on the artist's work.
Jana Švábová (1939-2017) was a self-taught Czech painter, actress, and life partner of Czech sculptor Mojmír Preclík (1931-2001). Since the late 1970s, they lived in a wooden house with a plum grove in the village of Kryštofovo Údolí, their natural sanctuary for twenty years where they both worked and raised their daughter. Since the 1970s she had been exhibiting, occasionally illustrating, most often poetry and fairy tales. Švábová's soft, enigmatic abstractions of washed-out ink, watercolour, and dry pastel, sometimes tinted with coffee or wine, are intimately rendered through human touch, exploring phenomena, inner and outer life, in the form of symbols, colour, and line, moving dream-like between drawing and painting. "On paper, a stage, with abstract artistic scenery, something is born between the beginning, the story, the feeling of destiny, the end - a vale of life experiences, memories, inspirations, feelings, thoughts and visual clues (sun, gate, bird, pebbles, conch, chair, ladder, musical instrument, fence, etc.) emotionally rendered in pastel." In her later life she became ill and ceased to make work, forgetting that she had ever been a painter.
Illustrated throughout in colour with works spanning the 1980s-2009, with photographic portrait, biography, exhibition list and accompanying texts in Czech.
Very Good, VG dust jacket.
2019, English / Polish
Hardcover, 64 pages, 19.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Wydawca / Olszanica
$24.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of this new volume dedicated to the drawings of Zdzisław Beksiński (1929–2005). Profusely illustrated throughout, with an introduction by art historian Wiesław Banach.
"Since early childhood, drawings had been the artist's main means of communication. "Usually, when I explain something to others, I like to draw it on a piece of paper", he would say. In fact, he left thousands of drawings, usually sketches, sometimes even notes reflecting the way he thought and rendered the original idea into a complete work of art. Due to its nature, this album merely presents a selection of his works that mark various stages of Beksinski's artistic activity, starting from his 1946 youthful self-portrait, to pieces from his final years." - Wiestaw Banach
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
According to Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro "In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust."
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" H.R. Giger
1980, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 78 pages, 31 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Abbey Library / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of Abbey Library's monograph on Andrea Mantegna, printed in Romania and published in 1980. Opening illustrated text by Romanian literary critic Alexandru Balaci (translated by Leon Levitchi), followed by "Chronology and Cordances" and bibliography. The remainder of the book is made up of colour plates illustrating Mantegna's paintings.
Andrea Mantegna (UK: /mænˈtɛnjə/, US: /mɑːnˈteɪnjə/,[2][3] Italian: [anˈdrɛːa manˈteɲɲa]; c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g. by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.
2008, English
Hardcover (cloth bound w. ribbon), 60 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Griffith University / Brisbane
$25.00 - Out of stock
Jenny Watson's Material Evidence : Works on fabric 1981 - 2005 was produced to accompany an international touring exhibition in 2009-10. Illustrated throughout with her works, alongside contributions by Holly Arden, Chris Handran, Sally Brand and Rosemary Hawker.
Jenny Watson is a major figure in contemporary art whose work continues to command an international audience engages by its freshness, gentle humour and eloquence. Her unconventional approach to painting combines colour, text, figures and recurring motifs, to create a meaningful narrative. The combination of images and text encourages the viewer to draw their own conclusions from the disparate pairings Watson offers.
Published by Griffith Artworks and supported by Queensland Arts.
1995, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the the retrospective catalogue of Australian artist Mike Brown, published in 1995 by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Tracing Brown's entire oeuvre from 1958-1991, 'from modernism to an alternative framework of the postmodern', with illustrations throughout accompanying texts by Mike Brown, Richard Haese, and Charles Nodrum.
Mike Brown (1938-1997) was a significant late 20th century contemporary Australian artist. One of the founders of the Annandale Imitation Realists of the early 1960s, now recognised as a key event in the development of anti-formalist art in Australia. Brown was a unique leader of alternative avant guard art in Australia, railing against elite art cliques. In 1965 Brown became the only Australian artist ever to be prosecuted for obscenity and scandals would continue even after his death in 1997. During his lifetime, Brown produced a multiplicity of work including naïve landscapes, pattern based abstraction, pop and text paintings, found object assemblages, graffiti, performance.
Very Good copy with VG dust jacket.
2019, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 23 × 30 cm
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$20.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Helen Hughes and David Homewood (Discipline Nº 5); Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio (Más allá del fin Nº 3).
Discipline, Más allá del fin (translating to ‘discipline beyond the end’)—represents an effort to map a South–South relationship between Chile and Australia, and even more specifically, between its southernmost island tips: Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania. For centuries, the Northern imagination conceived of these places as the very personification of distance itself, whereas the editors of Más allá del fin refer to Tierra del Fuego as ‘the centre of the known universe’. In addition to publishing a range of essays on modern and contemporary art, this joint issue recentres and forges new connections between Southern perspectives, generating a dynamic and relational art history of the contemporary.
Designed by Robert Milne.
Discipline is a publisher and contemporary art journal edited by Nicholas Croggon, David Homewood, and Helen Hughes. Alongside artist pages and interviews, it publishes research essays about contemporary Australian art, and histories and theories of contemporary art as a global industry or phenomenon. For each issue a guest editor, from somewhere else in the world, is invited to contribute a guest edited section. Guest editors since 2011 are: Vivian Ziherl; Maria Fusco; Raimundas Malašauskas; Ferdiansyah Thajib, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center; and Carla Macchiavello and Camila Marambio, Ensayos.
2016, English
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 192 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$340.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the instantly out-of-print, highly sought after first hardcover monograph on Etel Adnan, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones and published on on occasion of the exhibition Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World at Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 2 June – 11 September 2016. Heavy illustrated important reference on the artist.
Painter, essayist and poet Etel Adnan (born 1925 in Beirut) works in various media, from painting, drawing, poetry, film and tapestry. After studying at the Sorbonne and then Harvard, in the late 1950s, Adnan taught philosophy at the University of California and started to paint. Her early works were largely abstract compositions she was interested in the immediate beauty of colour. These earliest paintings were suggestive of landscapes and included forms that referenced specific places. In the 1970s she moved to the area near Mount Tamalpais in California, which became the central subject matter of numerous paintings and poems. From the 1960s until the present, Adnan has also made tapestries, inspired by the Persian rugs of her childhood. Over the course of the 1960s, she moved away from purely abstract forms and discovered ‘leporellos’ (accordion-folded sketchbooks) in which she could mix drawing with writing and poetry. Her writing contains multiple references and responses to the politics and violence in the world around her. From her earliest poem in English, which addressed the Vietnam War, to her award-winning 1978 novel, Sitt Marie-Rose, she explores the political and personal dimensions of violence and articulates her experience of exile from familiar landscapes and languages.
Adnan’s artworks feature in numerous collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the British Museum, London.
First edition, fine copy with light corner bumping.
1992, Japanese
Hardcover (clothbound), 98 pages (w. fold-outs), 42 x 30 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Edition C / Zürich
$150.00 - In stock -
"The "Necronomicon" is a legendary magical book that is kept in inaccessible places only in a few, incompletely preserved specimens because it could have disastrous consequences if it fell into the wrong hands. It was written down around 730 AD in Yemen by the legendary Abdul Al Azred. It is said to tell of things and events that took place in the gray age, and illustrations of uncanny creatures lurking in the depths of the earth and the seas, one day destroying mankind and striking the world.
Al Azred's "Necronomicon" is a kind of museum of the most wonderful abominations and perversions. The well-known writer HP Lovecraft was the first to report in his "Cthulhu" mythology of this work. Many other science fiction and fantasy writers have quoted this fictional work time and again, but it has only become a visual reality in "HR Giger's Necronomicon"!"
The second volume of this oversized and visually overwhelming collection takes us further through the incredible history of one of the most brilliant fantasy artists of the century. Reproducing Giger's award-winning work for the film ALIEN, his paintings, environments, sculptural works, his work for "The Tourist", collaborations with Blondie's Debbie Harry, his "New York City" series from the late 1970's and much more, all beautifully reproduced in full-colour and black and white, full-bleed spreads, including fold-out pages. Also includes interviews, texts, biography. These Giger folio books have become very desirable, collectable editions in their various printings around the world, the series encompassing the work of one of the world's most unique and influential visionaries.
First hardcover Japanese edition, published by Treville, Tokyo, in 1992. Light foxing/splitting/bumping to spine top and bottom, one semi-split from binding on endpaper, otherwise perfectly preserved throughout.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 248 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$74.00 $35.00 - Out of stock
How the poet Robert Duncan and the artist Jess made the household part of their separate and collaborative creative practice.
“I'm a householder,” the poet Robert Duncan once explained. “My whole idea of being able to work was to have a household.” In this book, Tara McDowell examines the household (physical and conceptual) that Duncan established with the artist Jess, beginning in 1951 when the two men exchanged marriage vows, and ending with Duncan's death in 1988. For Duncan and Jess, the household—rather than the studio, gallery, or collective—provided the support structure for their art. Indeed, McDowell argues convincingly, their work was coextensive with their household. The material surroundings of their house in San Francisco and the daily rhythms of their domestic lives became part of their creative practice.
Duncan wrote poetry that is romantic, ornate, and obscure; Jess (born Burgess Franklin Collins) created multi-imaged, complex collages and assemblages. McDowell explores their life and work—reading Duncan and Jess with and against each other, in alignment and misalignment. She examines their illustrated book Caesar's Gate, a collaborative effort that led them to reject collaboration; considers each man's lifelong preoccupation with an unfinished project, Jess's Narkissos and Duncan's The H.D. Book; and discusses their “origin myths” and self-made genealogies, describing them as a form of witness in the face of the calamities of the twentieth century.
Duncan and Jess made the household a necessary precondition for their art making. Doing so, they reclaimed and rehabilitated the domestic—from which gay couples were traditionally excluded—for their own uses. The household permitted them to reimagine the world. McDowell's portrait of a couple expands to encompass broader issues, urgent in midcentury America and still resonant today: belonging and kinship, alienation, and catastrophe.
Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She has worked as a curator at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
1984, Japanese / English / French
Softcover, 149 pages (112 ill.), 27 × 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seibu / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Scarce Japanese Francis Picabia catalogue produced on the occasion of an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Seibu Takanawa 21 July-5 September 1984 and The Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo 9 September-21 October 1984.
Richly illustrated with many of Picabia's works spanning his entire oeuvre in painting, drawing, text and print, with texts in Japanese, with some English and French.
Francis Picabia (22 January 1879 – 30 November 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. His was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.
Very Good copy throughout.
1988, Italian / French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 324 pages, 31 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$200.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce first Italian edition of the ultimate Buren photographic album, 1988's Photos-Souvenirs (1965-1988). Compiled by Buren, this over-sized, comprehensive hardcover book chronologically traces his entire career up (until the year of publication) through 400 colour and b/w photographs of his gallery exhibitions, architectural interventions, outdoor installations, performances, studios, and everything else, from the awnings to his Toile/Voile sailboat works. Although the book is almost entirely made up of photographs, it opens with a text by Buren (translated into Italian from French) and closes with an in-depth index of the collected works, with details and captions by Buren in their original French. A must for any Buren fan.
Often classified as a Minimalist, French artist Daniel Buren (born 25 March 1938) is known best for using regular, contrasting colored stripes in an effort to integrate visual surface and architectural space, notably on historical, landmark architecture. Among his chief concerns is the "scene of production" as a way of presenting art and highlighting facture (the process of 'making' rather than for example, mimesis or representation of anything but the work itself). The work is site-specific installation, having a relation to its setting in contrast to prevailing ideas of an autonomous work of art.
Very Good copy in original dust jacket (preserved under mylar wrap), with small chip/shelf bumping to bottom of hardcover not affecting the jacket or the pages at all.
1999, Japanese / English / Italian / German
Hardcover, 120 pages, 20.6 × 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Toyota Municipal Museum of Art / Aichi
$90.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce and beautifully compiled hardcover catalogue published in Japan in 1999 to accompany the unique exhibition, Silent Friendship : 1960-90's: 7 Artists, featuring the work of Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, Tony Cragg, Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Pino Pascali, and Giuseppe Penone. Generous colour spreads of each artist are accompanied by biographies, exhibition histories and text contributions by and about the artists in their native language(s), including Buren's reflections "In those days Europe", Tony Cragg on "that era" and James Lee Byars, Giuseppe Penone remembering the "cubes, giraffes and weapons of Pino Pascali", Masahiro Aoki on Imi Knoebel, Masao Chatan on Giuseppe Penone, Tomoaki Kitagawa on Tony Cragg the "Material Seeker", Laszlo Glozer and Joseph Beuy's in conversation about Blinky Palermo, and more. Through twenty-six paintings, sculptures and installations the exhibition presented a meaningful overview of the broad scope of the artistic expressions of 7 artists from the 1960s that embodied the theme of the collection, "the art of our time". "Each of them in his own individual way strongly provokes in us new ideas and emotions, suggesting new possibilities for the arts of the next generation." - from the Introduction
Very Good copy.
2016, French / English
Softcover (Spiral-bound), 144 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Ed. of 100,
Published by
Kunstverein / Amsterdam
$65.00 - Out of stock
Between 1932 and 1936 five edition of the cahier Abstraction Création: Art non-figuratif was published in Paris by the eponymous association, uniting all movements who worked abstractly. The magazine not only formalised a new tendency for language in visual art, but also became a form of explicit self-promotion and opposition against the growing force of figurative Surrealism, led by André Breton. Two minimal yet clear criteria needed to be fulfilled to become a member of the association: you had to be an artist and work non-figuratively. This resulted in a list of members of long-forgotten artists mingled with names such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, Calder, Delaunay, Van Doesburg, and Brancusi.
Second edition of 100 copies.
1982, Japanese
Softcover, 100 pages, 24 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shoto Museum of Art / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce Onchi Kōshirō catalogue, published in 1982 for a special exhibition of Kōshirō's work at the Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, with exhibition history, biography, list of works, and accompanying texts (all in Japanese). All title captions in English, also. Includes exhibition announcement and other printed ephemera relating to the exhibition inserted.
Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955) was a Tokyo-born, Japanese print-maker. The father of the sōsaku-hanga movement, Onchi is considered a leading figure in Japanese abstraction, credited with producing Japan's first purely abstract painting in 1915. Unlike traditional commercial woodblock printmakers, the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement artists were inspired by painting and carried out every stage of production themselves: designing, cutting, and printing, then circulating the finished works to a relatively small élite circle. Throughout his career he produced masterful single-sheet prints and designed over 1000 books, as well as being a poet, art theorist and photographer. Abandoning traditional school teachings, in 1911, under the influence of Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934), Onchi began to design books and quickly became involved in producing print and poetry magazines. He designed the first edition of Hagiwara Sakutarō's (1886-1942) innovative collection of poems Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon, 1917). In 1939, he founded the First Thursday Society (一木会, Ichimokukai), which was crucial to the postwar revival of the sōsaku-hanga movement, providing aspiring young artists with resources and comradeship during the war years when resources were scarce and censorship severe. Onchi believed that artistic creation originates from the self and was more interested in expressing subjective emotions through abstract prints than in replicating images and forms in the objective world. He called his poetic and evocative print style 'lyrique'. Onchi's innovative prints incorporated the use of everyday objects such as fabrics, string, paper blocks, fish fins, and leaves. From around 1932, Onchi worked on the design of a number of books about photography and began using photography in the spirit of shinkō shashin, creating photograms and working with plants, animals and still-life objets. Onchi was sent to China in 1939 and later the same year returned to Tokyo and had an exhibition of his Chinese works. In 1951 he exhibited his photographic works but otherwise dropped out of photography. He died in Tokyo on 3 June 1955.
Very Good copy. Light tanning and some light spotting to covers, otherwise clean throughout. A wonderful copy.
2016, English / Japanese
Hardcover, 364 pages, 24.6 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
The National Museum of Modern Art / Wakayama
The National Museum of Modern Art / Tokyo
$180.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the most exhaustive (now out of print) volume on the work and life of Japanese artist and father of the sōsaku-hanga movement, Onchi Kōshirō, published on the occasion of a major retrospective at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, 2016.
The most comprehensive monograph ever produced on Onchi Kōshirō, this book beautifully captures the entire oeuvre of one of the most innovative figures in twentieth century Japan. Largely considered the creator of the first abstract painting in Japan (c. 1915), this profusely illustrated volume presents colour reproductions of his prolific modern print and photographic work, as well as his oils, watercolours, drawings, and countless historical book designs spanning over 350 pages. An exhaustive chronology, biography and catalogue are accompanied by major essays in both English and Japanese, as well as many seldom seen photographs of Onchi throughout his life.
Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955) was a Tokyo-born, Japanese print-maker. The father of the sōsaku-hanga movement, Onchi is considered a leading figure in Japanese abstraction, credited with producing Japan's first purely abstract painting in 1915. Unlike traditional commercial woodblock printmakers, the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement artists were inspired by painting and carried out every stage of production themselves: designing, cutting, and printing, then circulating the finished works to a relatively small élite circle. Throughout his career he produced masterful single-sheet prints and designed over 1000 books, as well as being a poet, art theorist and photographer. Abandoning traditional school teachings, in 1911, under the influence of Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934), Onchi began to design books and quickly became involved in producing print and poetry magazines. He designed the first edition of Hagiwara Sakutarō's (1886-1942) innovative collection of poems Tsuki ni hoeru (Howling at the Moon, 1917). In 1939, he founded the First Thursday Society (一木会, Ichimokukai), which was crucial to the postwar revival of the sōsaku-hanga movement, providing aspiring young artists with resources and comradeship during the war years when resources were scarce and censorship severe. Onchi believed that artistic creation originates from the self and was more interested in expressing subjective emotions through abstract prints than in replicating images and forms in the objective world. He called his poetic and evocative print style 'lyrique'. Onchi's innovative prints incorporated the use of everyday objects such as fabrics, string, paper blocks, fish fins, and leaves. From around 1932, Onchi worked on the design of a number of books about photography and began using photography in the spirit of shinkō shashin, creating photograms and working with plants, animals and still-life objets. Onchi was sent to China in 1939 and later the same year returned to Tokyo and had an exhibition of his Chinese works. In 1951 he exhibited his photographic works but otherwise dropped out of photography. He died in Tokyo on 3 June 1955.
Fine, As New copy.
2019, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 12.5 x 17.6 cm
Published by
NWEB / Melbourne
$10.00 $5.00 - In stock -
NWEB was previously a small project that ran out of the VCA painting studios. This book was published on the occasion of “Let me sit in the corner, I’ve just turned Zero”. It logically recalls the 18 exhibitions organised by NWEB as well as providing three newly commissioned texts to accompany the exhibition and publication.
NWEB was effectively a spare studio, it strived to be a heterotopia offering some sort of regeneration. Although the project was unwilling to align itself with a curatorial ideology the process of organising the shows tended to locate itself around an interest in collaborative play and intuitive pairings.
2019, English / German
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
In the current issue of Texts on Art, "Literature," we explore the emergence of the genre of "autofiction": a field in literature that has been taken up between the formally distinct categories of fiction and autobiography. Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, among others, whose works are exemplary in developing the form of writing in which the fictitious ego merges with the voices of others, where these voices are potentially in the social more generally.
ISSUE NO. 115 / SEPTEMBER 2019 "LITERATUR"
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
BETWEEN YOU AND ME / A Correspondence on Autofiction in Contemporary Literature between Isabelle Graw and Brigitte Weingart
WOMAN AS SUBJECT OR EXEMPLARY OF HER KIND / A Conversation between Maija Timonen and Rachel Cusk
CLAUDE HAAS
ON - THE DEMISE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE WHIRL OF AUTOFICTION. OR: REALITY TODAY
SURRENDER AS FREEDOM / Interview with Enis Maci by Aram Lintzel
PETER REHBERG
- QUEER AUTOFICTION AS BODY PROTOCOL
DIRK VON LOWTZOW
SOME QUESTIONS FOR LEÏLA SLIMANI
LEANDER SCHOLZ - LITERATURE OF WORKING-CLASS CHILDREN
JUTTA KOETHER -
WHEN YOU PAINT APPLES, DO YOU ALSO FEEL YOUR BREASTS AND KNEES BECOMING APPLES?
NEW DEVELOPMENT
EMPIRE OF ETHER / Colin Lang on the Advent of Drone Exhibitions
ROTATION
LIFE PRESERVER / Sven Lütticken on Alice Creischer’s “In the Stomach of the Predators: Writings and Collaborations”
KLANG KÖRPER
PROTO-WHATEVER-THIS-NEXT-PHASE-IS / Annika Haas über Holly Herndon in der Volksbühne Berlin und im Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel
REVIEWS
BLUE CUBES: VOLLGELAUFENE VOLUMEN / Diedrich Diederichsen über die 58. Biennale in Venedig
THE POWER OF NO / Eva Díaz on the Whitney Biennial 2019
GLOBAL SALE / Simon Baier über El Anatsui im Haus der Kunst, München
TO GIVE AND GIVE SUN / Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu on Cecilia Vicuña at Witte de With, Rotterdam
FREE WILLY / Mikael Brkic on Jana Euler at Galerie Neu, Berlin
UNDERSTANDING THAT EVERYONE IS NOT UNDERSTANDING EVERYTHING / Gunter Reski über Heike-Karin Föll in den KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
CONSIDER NOT THE BIRD’S, BUT THE WORM’S VIEW / Adam Kleinman on Cian Dayrit at Nome Gallery, Berlin
KÜNSTLERIN SEIN / Georg Imdahl über Anna Oppermann in der Kunsthalle Bielefeld
SETTING THE RECORD STRAY / Ana Teixeira Pinto on “Straying from the Line” at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
CHICAGO, NOW! / Hans-Jürgen Hafner über Gustave Caillebotte in der Alten Nationalgalerie, Berlin
HIDE AND SEEK / Magnus Schaefer on Lydia Ourahmane at Bodega, New York
WE NEVER KNOW HOW HIGH WE ARE / Thomas Groetz über Mayo Thompson in der Galerie Buchholz, Berlin
INVOLUNTARY TRACES / Daniel Ricardo Quiles on Jonathas de Andrade at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
POETISCHE SEZIERUNGEN / Isabel Mehl über Cana Bilir-Meier im Hamburger Kunstverein
CAVEMAN BLUES / Saim Demircan on Edith Karlson and Dan Mitchell at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn
DIE MEISTERIN / Stefan Neuner über Lotte Laserstein in der Berlinischen Galerie
STAGING FEMINISM / Luisa Lorenza Corna on “The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy” at FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, and “Doing Deculturalization” at Museion, Bolzano
WAHRNEHMUNG IST VERSCHIEBBAR / Christina Irrgang über Bea Schlingelhoff in der Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf
GRIT AND VITALITY / Daniel Sturgis on Joan Snyder at Blain Southern, London
NACHRUFE
LINDA BILDA (1963−2019)
by Silvia Eiblmayr
AGNÈS VARDA (1928–2019)
by Jennifer Stob
MICHEL SERRES (1930−2019)
by Lorenz Engell
KLAUS BUSSMANN (1941–2019
by Ulrike Groos and Hans Haacke
EDITION
BIRGIT MEGERLE
STERLING RUBY