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.
1976, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 28 x 27 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
Offering a unique glimpse into the acquisition priorities of a large-scale institution, this catalogue juxtaposes works from the Guggenheim’s own collection with a selection of highly ranked artworks on the list of potential acquisitions, showcasing 32 American artists who shaped the mid-20th century's art world.
Published by Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, to accompany the exhibition Acquisition Priorities: Aspects of Postwar Painting in American, October 15, 1976–January 16, 1977, this book functions as much more than just a review of postwar American painting, acting as a self-analytical, institutional critique bringing the strengths and weaknesses of the Guggenheim’s holdings into stark relief. The catalogue features large images in both colour and black and white, followed by artists’ biographies, which are illustrated by social photographs.
Features: Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Alfred Jensen, Jack Tworkov, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, amongst others.
Text by Thomas M. Messer
1968, English
Softcover, 40 pages, 20 x 19 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
German Art Council to the Adelaide Festival of Arts / Adelaide
$25.00 - Out of stock
A curious catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition of new German painting held in Adelaide during the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1968.
Includes a selection of 21 colour and black and white reproductions of works by Wolf Vostell, Horst Antes, Konrad Klapheck, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Paul Wunderlich, and many others, alongside a text by Werner Schmalenbach.
Published in Adelaide and printed in Germany.
1977, English
Softcover, 370 pages, 21 x 26.5 cm
Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Alfred Knopf / New York
LACMA / Los Angeles
$40.00 - Out of stock
This book represents a major event in the art world. It is based on the first international exhibition of art by women, assembled by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from dozens of private and public collections throughout the world, among them the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Uffzi, the Victoria and Albert, and the Prado. It contains the work, chronologically arranged, of eighty-four women painters, from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century, from sixteenth-century portraiture to modern abstraction.
Included are works by artists as familiar as Kathe Kollwitz, Mary Cassatt, Marie Laurencin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Léonor Fini, and Sonia Delaunay. Here, as well, is the work of women who received much attention, even acclaim, in their own time but whose accomplishments art history has neglected and whose paintings are now largely inaccessible to the public — artists such as Anne Vallayer-Coster in the eighteenth century (who was praised for painting “like a clever man”), Judith Leyster (whose Jolly Toper was attributed until recently to Frans Hals), Vanessa Bell, the brilliantly talented sister of Virginia Woolf, and Anna Dorothea Lisiewska Therbusch (about whom her contemporary Diderot wrote: ‘‘It was not talent that she lacked in order to create a big sensation in this country..'.it was youth; it was beauty: it was modesty; it was coquetry; one must be ecstatic over the merits of our great male artists, take lessons from them, have good breasts and good buttocks, and surrender oneself to one’s teachers”). Individual commentaries consider the work of each artist in the context of her time, tell the story of her life, often quoting from letters, journals, and the memoirs of contemporaries, and discuss not only the techniques and the principles of her art but also the conditions and expectations that fostered or inhibited her development. Two brilliant critical essays encompassing all the periods represented are provided by the distinguished art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Hochlin.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA December 21, 1976-March 13, 1977. 1981 Edition.
2005 / 2006, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. printed paper dust-jacket), 112 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st edition, signed, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
The National Museum of Art / Osaka
Ueno Royal Museum / Tokyo
$580.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce first edition copy of this fine Japanese Polke catalogue, signed by Sigmar Polke.
Published in 2005/2006 to accompany the Sigmar Polke exhibition "Alice In Wonderland" held at the Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo and the National Museum of Art in Osaka, this handsome catalogue features many full-colour reproductions of Polke's paintings and drawings throughout.
"This exhibition is composed mainly of works in the collection of the artist, so it might be described as an exhibition of "Polke by Polke." In it, we examine the artist's career through approximately 30 of his large-scale paintings, from his early masterworks Alice in Wonderland (1971), and representative pieces of the 1980s and 1990s to some of his most recent work."
Includes texts in English and Japanese by Peter-Klaus Schuster, Wataru Hayashi, and more, plus an interview with Polke, biography, bibliography, exhibition list and list of exhibited works.
Comes wrapped in printed paper dust-jacket with Sigmar Polke's signature penned into the front flyleaf.
A very collectable Polke publication!
Polke is a major contemporary German artist and one of the most noted painters in the world. Polke was born in Oels, Silesia, formerly an eastern part of German territory, in 1941. At age 12 he moved to West Germany. After studying at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, he began making paintings incorporating photographs and references to American pop art and he has continued to develop experimental methods. Paintings that show the raster dots used in printing became his trademark and he also produced paintings on printed fabric or transparent materials instead of canvas. With broad knowledge and penetrating observation, parody, irony, and a sense of humor, he has combined a wide variety of motifs from the everyday life of contemporary people, fairy tales, history, military events,myths, and alchemy. These groups of images arouse the imagination of viewers. They are both fascinating and enigmatic. He received the Gold Lion Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2002.
1997, French
Softcover, 32 pages, 21 x 26 cm
1st edition of 1000, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Villa Arson / Nice
$160.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce catalogue of German painter Michael Krebber, published in an edition 1000 in 1997 on the occasion of a solo exhibition at Villa Arson, Centre national des arts plastiques, Nice, 28 march-18 may. Entirely made up of close-crop photocopy reproductions in black and white of his painting works on paper and textiles. A beautiful publication.
2016, English / French
Softcover, 150 pages, 240 x 175 mm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$29.00 $10.00 - In stock -
May no.16 focuses on recent feminist debates actualizing the history of Italian feminist collectives of the 1970s and 1980s. The issue is a continuation of the issue 4 of May, which reprinted and translated a selection of texts from the time. The issue’s touchstone is the work of writer and co-founder of Rivolta Femminile, Carla Lonzi. Throughout her life, Lonzi refused the power of a masculine creativity that exploits the reproductive, supportive activity of women. The texts assembled in May no.16 bring that refusal to contemporary light.
Weed and the Practice of Liberty
Claire Fontaine
The Paradox of Self-Abolition: a Mapping Exercice
Marina Vishmidt
Presence and Absence
Melissa Gordon
Narrative Without End
Anna De Filippi
An Exercise in the Practice of affidamento
Alex Martinis Roe
On Marinella Pirelli’s Films
Lucia Aspesi
Human Strike Between Foreignness and Responsibility
Claire Fontaine
Introduction to Double Bind
Rhea Anastas
Visual Insert
LGG$B
Citadelle. On Marie Angeletti at Édouard Montassut, Paris
Jacob Stewart-Halevy
On Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Lotte Arndt, Catalina lozano (eds), Colonial Collect and Affect, Crawling Doubles
Emmanuelle Chérel
A World Exactly Like This One. On Credits by Hannah Black
Jack Gross
Get Some Rest Pam, or Jason Bourne comes of age. On Paul Greengrass’ film, Jason Bourne
Maija Timonen
Aggregation or Mere Dislocation. On the 9th Berlin Biennale and “Painting 2.0: Expression in the information Age,” mumok, Vienna
Kari Rittenbach
Short Story
Jeanne Graff
Limited Edition
Hans-Christian Lotz
About MAY Revue:
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, quaterly, contemporary art practice and theory in direct engagement with the issues, contexts and strategies that construct these two fields. An approach that could be summed up as critique at work – or as critique actively performed in text and art forms alike.
Featuring essays, interviews, art works and reviews by artists, writers and diverse practitioners of the arts, the magazine also intends to address the economy of the production of knowledge – the starting point of this reflection being the space of indistinction between information and advertisement typical of our time. This implies a dialogue with forms of critique produced in other fields.
1978, English
Out of print title / Used*
Published by
Collier Books / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Book edition of Linda Nochlin's famous essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", that first appeared in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews, together with the follow-up essay "GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS" by Thomas B. Hess. Together these texts are followed by a collection of ten essay replies to "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", including "Dialogue" by Elaine de Kooning with Rosalyn Drexler; "The Hermaphrodite" by Bridget Riley; "Do Your Work" by Louise Nevelson; "Women without Pathos" by Eleanor Antin; "The Double-Bind" by Suzi Gablik; "Healthy Self-Love" by Sylvia Stone; "Moving Out, Moving Up" by Marjorie Strider; "Social Conditions Can Change" by Lynda Benglis; "Artists Transgress All Boundaries" by Rosemarie Castoro; "SEXUAL ART-POLITICS" by Elizabeth C. Baker; and "IN THE UNIVERSITY" by Lee Hall. Five sections of the book are made up of exemplary art works by Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Mary Bauermeister, Lee Hall, Nancy Graves, Dorothea Rockburne, Lee Bontecou, Jo Baer, Niki de St. Phalle, Kiki Kogelnik, Deborah Remington, Joan Snyder, Louise Nevelson, Lynda Benglis, Eleanor Antin, Sylvia Stone, Suzi Gablik, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Sylvia Sleigh, Jean Follett, Charmion Von Wiegand, Louise Bourgeois, Marcia Marcus,Marisol, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Chryssa, Mary Frank, Perle Fine, Elaine de Kooning, Roslyn Drexler, and many more.
1970, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Studio Vista / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
"Renderings : Critical Essays on a Century of Modern Art" is a collection of forty-three essays, originally published in The Nation, Artforum, Art International and elsewhere, organized in six sections, "Revisitations Within the Modern Tradition"; "American Art and the Generation of the Second World War"; "Essays in Modern Sculpture"; "Current Art: Options and Responses"; "Sketches in the Aesthetics of Photography" and "The Methodology of Criticism". Illustrated sections reproduce selected works by the many artists featured throughout the texts collected here, including Gustave Courbet, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Toulouse-Lautrec, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, David Smith, Rene Magritte, Mark Rothko, Camille Pissarro, Henri Matisse, Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, Édouard Manet, Pierre Bonnard, Alberto Giacometti, Joseph Cornell, Medardo Rosso, Francis Bacon,Julio Gozalez, John Chamberlain, Ronald Bladen, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Larry Poons, Diane Arbus, Marcel Duchamp, and many others.
Max Kozloff (born 1933) is an American Art Historian, art critic of modern art and photographer. He has been art editor at The Nation, and Executive Editor of Artforum. His essay, "American Painting During the Cold War" is of particular importance to the criticism on American Abstract Expressionism.
2016, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 20 x 28.7 cm
Published by
Bergen Kunsthall / Norway
Le Consortium / Dijon
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$120.00 $70.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Martin Clark, Anne Pontégnie, Steinar Sekkingstad
Texts by Ina Blom, Martin Clark, Anne Pontégnie, Steinar Sekkingstad
Fredrik Værslev’s work navigates between different painterly traditions, and demonstrates the possibilities and relevance of the medium today. He treats his paintings as objects, often created through more or less laborious, serial, or deterministic processes where time itself, as well as various external factors, become active cocreators in the making of the work. In several series, he has left his paintings outdoors for long periods of time, allowing the weather and external wear to complete the work. Other works employ apparently clichéd techniques, motifs, or art-historical quotations (i.e., dripping and splattering). More recently, Værslev has been working with a tool used for marking painted lines on roads and sports fields.
Published in conjunction with Fredrik Værselv’s exhibition “All Around Amateur” at the Bergen Kunsthall and Le Consortium, Dijon, this publication, comes in two different versions, with each book comprising 320 one-to-one digital images scanned from eight of Værslev’s new “sunset” paintings. Each canvas produces a total of eighty scanned images, which are reproduced in the book sequentially, left to right, top to bottom. The full-bleed scans in each “volume,” together, reproduce an entire wall of paintings from the exhibition. The paintings, based on photographs of sunsets taken by Værslev on his iPhone from airplane windows, evoke the work of art-historical figures such as J. M. W. Turner, Mark Rothko, and Edvard Munch.
The catalogue also includes newly commissioned texts by Ina Blom, Martin Clark, and Steinar Sekkingstad as well as an interview with artist Anne Pontégnie.
Copublished with Bergen Kunsthall, and Le Consortium, Dijon
Design by Fraser Muggeridge Studio
1977, English
Softcover, 74 pages, 15 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Fischer Fine Art Limited / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Fantastic little catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition "Apocalypse and Utopia" at Fischer Fine Art Limited, London, March - May 1977.
Features the work of Karl Arnold, Ernst Barlach, Willi Baumeister, Herbert Bayer, Max Backmann, Heinrich Campendonck, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Georg Grosz, Erich Heckel, Hannah Höch, Adolf Hölzel, Johannes Itten, Alexei Von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Georg Kolbe, Käthe Kollwitz, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Otto Müller, Emil Nolde, Max Hermann Pechstein, Christian Rohlfs, Oskar Schlemmer, Karl Schmidt0Rottluff, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Segal, Hans Walter.
"The idea for this exhibition arose when we were fortunate enough to be offered the famous Hess Guest Book. Around this nucleus we have planned a view of art in Germany between 1910 and 1939. With the generous help of many collectors and galleries we have been able to illustrate the varied aspects of this complex and important period of German art."
The Guest Book was a two volume book-set that spanned the years 1907-1956. They were the guest books of the home of Industrialist Alfred Hess and Thekla Hess, who were great lovers and collectors of art. Their home in Erfurt regularly gathered together leading figures of the art, music and literature worlds, and their guest books collected the inscriptions, autographs, drawings and watercolours of these times.
"The Guest Book is a remarkable, unique document of the most innovative period of 20th-century German art and forms a reference source of the greatest importance."
With an introduction by professor and author Norbert Lynton, the first part of this catalogue reproduces works from The Guest Book, and the second full-colour and black and white reproductions of works in the exhibition of 1977. Includes a full catalogue of the works.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 280 pages, 19 x 26 cm
1st Edition, out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Tama Art University / Japan
$50.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 1st edition of this heavy book published on the occasion of the exhibition "1953 : Shedding Light on Art" at Meguro Museum of Art Tokyo, June 8 - July 21, 1996, an exhibition that looked deeply into the important transitional years of the early 1950s post-war Japanese and the climate of new modern design, architecture and the society that surrounded it. Giving birth to a new avant-garde in Japan, including Mono-ha, Gutai, Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) and other avant-garde movements, this books covers the vast array of artistic activity taking place in Japan in this period, across painting, sculpture, performance, design, architecture, photography, crafts, and more. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white. All texts in Japanese.
Includes inserted exhibition stub.
2014, English
Hardcover, 135 pages, 15 x 25 cm
1st edition, 1000 copies, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
Museum of Contemporary Art / Denver
$40.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Nora Burnett Abrams.
Texts by Michael Ned Holte, Sarah Robaio Sheridan, and Nora Burnett Abrams
Published in conjunction with Sietsema’s show at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Seven Films by Paul Sietsema is the first publication devoted to the artist’s films. In the words of Sarah Robayo Sheridan, “Paul Sietsema compounds organic and artificial detritus in all his artwork, scavenging in history’s wake to identify specific tools of cultural production and foraging for concepts of art promulgated in the words of artists and attitudes of critics. He mines film as a vestige, the medium of the mechanical age, pressing and squeezing its very obsolescence through a contemporary sieve. In so doing, the artist hovers in the switchover between a bodily inscription in the image and a fundamental reconstitution of sight and representation in the matrix of the virtual. Where body stops and image starts is a divide collapsing through a series of innovations and accidents that go back as far as the people of Pompeii trapped in an emulsion that marked their death, but which paradoxically carried forward their image into eternity.”
First edition of 1000 copies, now out of print.
1975, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 25 x 25 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Whitney Museum of American Art / New York
$60.00 - Out of stock
Rare Jo Baer catalogue from 1975, published to accompany a major mid-career retrospective of Jo Baer's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 1-July 13, 1975. Features colour and black and white reproductions of many of Baer's work, along with text by Barbara Haskell.
Jo Baer was born in Seattle, Washington in 1929. After completing graduate work in psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York, she began her career as an artist in Los Angeles in 1953. Seven years later, she returned to New York where she became a key participant in the Minimalist art movement. Her paintings were included with works by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Sol Lewitt in many of the first Minimalist art exhibitions in New York in the early 1960s.
Her unswerving commitment to painting as a radical art form brought her a one-person exhibition as early as 1966 at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. In 1975, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a mid-career retrospective of her work. In 1999, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam exhibited a large retrospective of her work. Recently the DIA Center for the Arts in New York also held a major exhibition of over 25 minimalist paintings and prints that she completed from 1960 to 1975.
In search of a more substantive art, Baer exiled herself from the New York art world with a move to Ireland in 1975. By 1983, she took a stance against abstract art as an avant-garde form with a polemical article in Art in America. Since 1984, she has lived and worked in Amsterdam. Baer continues to develop the formal content of her paintings in a quasi-figurative manner that she considers radical figuration — without pre-eminence of image or space.
1980, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Cornell Paperbacks / London
Phaidon / London
$38.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
"Edward Lucie-Smith, a critic and historian of art who is deeply immersed in the works and trends of the seventies here provides the first general survey of the decade. In a volume alive with visual images that are often surprising and sometimes disturbing, he analyzes the development both of old forms and of new ones, and provides a coherent framework for the general reader."
Contents: The Popular Arts; Post Pop and Mandarin Taste; Abstract Painting; Illusionary Art; Figurative Painting; Fetish Art and Happenings; Political Art; Art as Environment and Architecture; High-Tech and the Third World, plus a biographical list of the artists featured and a "further reading" list.
Includes the work of: Stephen Willats, Lawrence Weiner, Brice Marden, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vito Acconci, Jo Baer, Joseph Beuys, Lynda Benglis, Bob Law, Philip King, Alan Kessler, On Kawara, Douglas Huebler, John Kacere, Richard Long, Robert Mangold, Philip Guston, Hans Haacke, Nancy Grossman, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Graves, Walter de Maria, U-Fan, Claude Viallet, Nancy Spero, Peter Saul, Robert Ryman, James Rosenquist, Joel Shapiro, Sylvia Sleigh, Robert Stackhouse, Paul Thek, Giulio Paolini, Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Roman Opalka, Dennis Oppenheim, Tony Cragg, Judy Chicago, Larry Bell, Daniel Buren, Chuck Close, and many more.
2016, English
Softcover, 408 pages,17 x 23 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$56.00 - Out of stock
This volume is comprised of years of recent writing by the influential New York–based critic and curator Bob Nickas, widely considered one of the few independent voices still at work today. The 50 essays and interviews, written since 2007, are spread across five chapters, touching on encounters with artists from the 1960s to the ’80s to the present – among them, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, On Kawara, Isa Genzken, Steven Parrino, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kelley Walker and Pierre Huyghe.
1988, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 25 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Hirshhorn Museum / Washington
$50.00 $20.00 - In stock -
Catalogue for the 1988 exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum, featuring Wallace Berman, Clyde Connell, Bruce Conner, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Robert Helm, Alfred Jensen, Jess, Luis Jimenez and Peter Saul.
2011, English
Hardcover, 72 pages, 17.5 x 22 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
L&M Arts / New York
$190.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce catalogue published to accompany David Hammons' solo exhibition at L&M Arts, 26 Jan - 26 Feb, 2011. Cover to cover this hardcover book reproduces Hammons' amazing untitled "paintings" that play with the sculptural wrapping, draping and obscuring of what are mostly oil on canvas abstract expressionistic paintings, using black plastic garbage bags, torn industrial tarps and worn-out blankets and towels. L&M Arts is considered a gallery for Modernist painting (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline) founded by the collector Robert Mnuchin. The only text in the book is the invitation to open, and a New Yorker "Goings On" review of the exhibition, referring to the works as "Minimalist Expressionism".
A fantastic and seldom seen Hammons publication.
2016, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 28 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Mumok / Vienna
Walther König / Köln
$55.00 - Out of stock
The central concepts of Body, Psyche, and Taboo is a presentation of both the intellectual and the formal links between Vienna Actionism and artistic developments in early 20th century Vienna.
Works by Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler – the ‘scandal artists’ of the 1960s – are compared and contrasted with pieces by their equally controversial colleagues working at the dawn of the twentieth century, including Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, among others.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Body, Psyche, and Taboo: Vienna Actionism and Early Vienna Modernism at mumok, Vienna, 4 March – 16 May 2016.
Striking and heavily illustrated catalogue featuring the work of Artists Günter Brus, Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Max Oppenheimer, Anton Romako, Egon Schiele, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and accompanying texts by Eva Badura-Triska, Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, Rosemarie Brucher, and Bernadette Reinhold.
2015, English / German
Softcover, 124 pages (colour ill.)
Published by
Museum Haus Konstruktiv / Zurich
Walther König / Köln
$58.00 - Out of stock
After her huge success at dOCUMENTA (13), Museum Haus Konstruktiv is taking the opportunity to honor the painted oeuvre of Lebanese artist, poet and writer Etel Adnan (b. 1925 in Beirut, lives in Paris) with a comprehensive solo exhibition for the first time in Switzerland.
Etel Adnan is often described as a wanderer between cultures, places, languages and forms of expression. In 1959, while also working as a writer, she began to get involved in painting and drawing, later going on to produce fold-out books, tapestries and Super 8 mm films.
From the very start, her painting is solidly constructed, possessing a strong inner structure and organization: rectangles and cubes, laid on top of each other and beside each other, constitute her architectural vocabulary. She produces her work in one painterly flow, without making any corrections or painting over anything later.
Her painting style is strict, earnest and sensitive, without any sensationalism or superfluous embellishment. Her images play with memories that take on abstract forms and nevertheless develop a high degree of emotional strength.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Etel Adnan: La Joie de Vivre at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, 29 October 2015 – 31 January 2016.
2016, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 25 x 20 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$55.00 - Out of stock
Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. While her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century pre-dates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich. Af Klint sought to express her feelings transmitted to her form nature and the unseen spiritual world.
After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887, af Klint took a studio in the city where she produced and exhibited traditional landscapes, botanical drawings and portraits. However, by 1886 she had abandoned the conventions she learned at the Academy in favour of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult.
She privately joined four other female artists to form a group called ‘The Five’. They conducted séances to encounter what they believed to be spirits who wished to communicate via pictures, leading to experiments with automatic writing and drawing, which pre-dated the Surrealists by several decades.
This catalogue focuses primarily on af Klint’s body of work, The Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), and numerous works from the key series never published before. Consisting of 193 predominately abstract paintings in various series and subgroups, she painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds; good and evil; man and woman; religion and science.
Texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Jennifer Higgie, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones, Julia Voss
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 3 March – 22 May 2016.
2016, English
Softcover, 432 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$83.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue Raisonne of Heimo Zobernig's vast history of Books & Posters: 1980-2015, including reproduction and detailed information on 114 books, and 117 bosters, alongside texts by Diana Baldon, Moritz Küng. An essential aspect of Zobernig's work and a must-have heavy archive document for any fan.
Published by Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig.
Heavy book may require additional postage.
2005, English / German
Softcover, 376 pages, 21 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$180.00 - Out of stock
Volume one of the two-part major publication on the artist Sturtevant, both long out of print.
Sturtevant's investigations into the duality of original and copy, object and image, similarity and difference are contributions of outstanding importance to contemporary art.
Elaine Sturtevant (1930--2014), has been concerned since the mid-1960s with one of the most important themes in Western art - the aspect of originality. Her works are reproductions of existing works by such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Frank Stella, to name only a few. Often indistinguishable from the originals, they call attention to the crucial issues of origin and difference. Designed and produced in close collaboration with the artist, this opulently illustrated publication (produced and published consecutively with another catalogue rainsonné volume) offers an unprecedented overview of the unique and unparalleled work of this American artist. This special book functions somewhat like an artist's scrapbook, reproducing rarely seen photographs of Sturtevant in her studio producing the above-mentioned works, alongside promotional imagery, exhibitions views, and sketches, drawings, plans, notes, and photos from her work production throughout her entire career. An incredible insight into her working. Edited by Udo Kittelmann, Mario Kramer and Lena Maculan, this particular book also features a great interview between Sturtevant and the great artist/film director John Waters!
Published on the largest exhibition of the artists work at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main, September 25, 2004-January 30, 2005
1981, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages, 22 x 23cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Grace Borgenicht Gallery / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition at Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York, 1981. Includes reproductions of Avery's paintings; an introduction, "Milton Avery: An Appreciation" by Marianne Friedland; and chronology of major exhibitions, 1943-1982.
Milton Clark Avery (March 7, 1885 – January 3, 1965 ) was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. Avery's work is seminal to American abstract painting—while his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations and is not concerned with creating the illusion of depth as most conventional Western painting since the Renaissance has. Avery was often thought of as an American Matisse, especially because of his colorful and innovative landscape paintings. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era. Early in his career, his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational.
1984, English
Softcover, 14 pages, 17.8 x 23.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
University Art Gallery / Melbourne
$35.00 - Out of stock
WE ARE AT AN EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS. THE GALLERY HAS BECOME THE CAVE. IT IS A TIME OF THE APOCALYPSE + UTOPIA. THE ARTISTS HAVE 'HEWN THEIR PAINTINGS INTO THE WHITENESS OF THE WALLS'. IT IS ONCE AGAIN A PRIMITIVE SOCIETY. THE PICTURES TELL THEIR OWN STORIES.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Apocalypse + Utopia" at University Art Gallery, Melbourne, Feb 23 - April 8, 1984, curated by artist John Nixon and featuring the work of Gunter Christmann, Geoff Lowe, Dick Watkins and Jenny Watson.