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:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
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
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
2022, English / German
Hardcover, 176 pages, 27.5 x 22.4 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Établissement d'en face / Brussels
$70.00 - In stock -
Since the artist’s comprehensive monograph was published in 2017, many new paintings and sculptures have been created. They address emotional and also psychoanalytical issues. At the core of the interest lies the relationship between autonomy and heritage, the unconscious and the conscious, the carrying along of trauma or guilt, as well as hidden longings, fantasies, or the disclosure of shame.
This book documents Amelie von Wulffen’s exhibitions at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York / Gió Marconi, Milan / KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin / Établissement d’en face, Brussels / Galerie Meyer Kainer, Wien between 2018 and 2022.
Texts by Helmut Draxler, Valérie Knoll, Tonio Kröner.
English and German text.
1969 / 2006, English / French / German / Italian
Softcover binder (w. spring-loaded plate), 170 pages, 31.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
$290.00 - Out of stock
One of the great art documents of the 20th century, "Live in Your Head : When Attitudes Become Form", curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, March 22 - April 27, 1969. This is the impeccably re-produced facsimile edition of the exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition honouring the legacy of Szeemann in 2006, published by the Kunsthalle Bern, the producers of the original. Strictly limited edition and immediately out-of-print, this most faithful reprint, with the unique die-cut alphabetically tabbed index bound with hardware-fittings, has become as collectible as the 1969 edition.
Sponsored by the Philip Morris tobacco company, this was an important, extensive and primary exhibition dedicated to the amalgam of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art in Europe and the United States. The catalogue itself is designed and produced by Szeemann, and printed in Switzerland by Stämpfli & Cie in Bern. Alongside those of Seth Siegelaub, Szeemann's now historical catalogues changed the way exhibition publishing performed. Presented as a indexical binder (spring-bound with a metal plate) forming an index of alphabetical artist pages and accompanying texts. Includes a biography, bibliography, illustrations and portrait for each artist.
Texts by Harald Szeemann, Scott Burton, Grégoire Müller and Tommaso Trini.
Artists include Carl Andre, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Artschwager, Thomas Bang, Jared Bark, Robert Barry, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Marinus Boezem, Bill Bollinger, Michael Buthe, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Paul Cotton, Alighiero Boetti, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Ger Van Elk, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Paolo Icaro, Alain Jacquet, Neil Jenney, Jo Ann Kaplan, Eva Hesse, Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kounellis, Gary B. Kuehn, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Roelof Louw, Bruce McLean, Walter De Maria, David Medalla, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Pechter, Panamarenko, Michelangelo Pisteletto, Emilio Prini, Markus Raetz, Allen Ruppersberg, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Robert Ryman, Alan Saret, Sarkis, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Richard Tuttle, Frank Viner, Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner, William Wegman, William Wiley and Gilberto Zorio.
Texts in English, French, German and Italian.
As New with only light creasing to the overhanging edges of the cover edges, otherwise a Fine copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 23.2 x 29.2 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Sala Recalde / Bilbao
$120.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful over-sized landscape catalogue raisonné designed by Sol LeWitt and of his wall drawings, 1984—1992, originally published in conjunction with show held at Kunsthalle Bern, January 27 - March 12, 1989. Republished in this third revised, expanded and most complete edition, in conjunction with show held at Sala Recalde, Bilbao, Spain, 1992. Traveled to the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, 1993. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w illustrations extensively documenting the wall drawings by Sol LeWitt executed between 1984 and 1992. Edited by Susanna Singer, translated by Margaret Joss with text by Ulrich Loock. Catalogue raisonné by Susanna Singer of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings numbered 410 to 701. Text in English and German.
Good—VG copy, tight and clean internally with one crease to cover and light shelf wear to covers.
1969, English / French / German / Italian
Softcover binder (w. spring-loaded plate), 170 pages, 31.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
$600.00 - Out of stock
One of the great art documents of the 20th century, the original printing of the legendary catalogue for "Live in Your Head : When Attitudes Become Form", curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, March 22 - April 27, 1969. Very rare original 1969 edition!
Sponsored by the Philip Morris tobacco company, this was an important, extensive and primary exhibition dedicated to the amalgam of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art in Europe and the United States. The catalogue itself is designed and produced by Szeemann, and printed in Switzerland by Stämpfli & Cie in Bern. Alongside those of Seth Siegelaub, Szeemann's now historical catalogues changed the way exhibition publishing performed. Presented as a indexical binder (spring-bound with a metal plate) forming an index of alphabetical artist pages and accompanying texts. Includes a biography, bibliography, illustrations and portrait for each artist.
Texts by Harald Szeemann, Scott Burton, Grégoire Müller and Tommaso Trini.
Artists include Carl Andre, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Artschwager, Thomas Bang, Jared Bark, Robert Barry, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Marinus Boezem, Bill Bollinger, Michael Buthe, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Paul Cotton, Alighiero Boetti, Hanne Darboven, Jan Dibbets, Ger Van Elk, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Hans Haacke, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Paolo Icaro, Alain Jacquet, Neil Jenney, Jo Ann Kaplan, Eva Hesse, Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kounellis, Gary B. Kuehn, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Roelof Louw, Bruce McLean, Walter De Maria, David Medalla, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Pechter, Panamarenko, Michelangelo Pisteletto, Emilio Prini, Markus Raetz, Allen Ruppersberg, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Robert Ryman, Alan Saret, Sarkis, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Richard Tuttle, Frank Viner, Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner, William Wegman, William Wiley and Gilberto Zorio.
Texts in English, French, German and Italian.
Light wear and marking to folder covers, internal rubbing from metal plate, previous owners name and "69" to top of inside cover, otherwise very good copy throughout, complete.
2017, English / German / Portuguese
Softcover, 152 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art / Porto
$42.00 - Out of stock
Exploring the continual exhaustion, withdrawal, engagement and renewal of painting, the work of Michael Krebber is a central reference in conversations about the mediumʼs continued relevance.
The large selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures featured in this two-volume publication showcases Krebber’s practice over the last three decades.
Stations in a recursive cycle of starts, fits and restarts, scattered in a variety of motifs and gestures, by turns emphatic, arresting or ironic together they trace the artistʼs approach to painting, its expressive language as well as its critical function.
Volume 1 of 2.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Michael Krebber: The Living Wedge at Fundação De Serralves, Porto, Portugal (15 October 2016 – 15 January 2017) and at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (18 February – 30 April 2017).
English, German and Portuguese text.
2017, English / German / Portuguese
Softcover, 160 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art / Porto
$42.00 - Out of stock
Exploring the continual exhaustion, withdrawal, engagement and renewal of painting, the work of Michael Krebber is a central reference in conversations about the mediumʼs continued relevance.
The large selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures featured in this two-volume publication showcases Krebberʼs practice over the last three decades.
Stations in a recursive cycle of starts, fits and restarts, scattered in a variety of motifs and gestures, by turns emphatic, arresting or ironic together they trace the artistʼs approach to painting, its expressive language as well as its critical function.
Volume 2 of 2
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Michael Krebber: The Living Wedge at Fundação De Serralves, Porto, Portugal (15 October 2016 – 15 January 2017) and at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (18 February – 30 April 2017).
English, German and Portuguese text.
1984, German
Softcover, 38 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
$48.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of a major travelling exhibition of German-born Swiss Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim at Kunsthalle Bern 8th September - 14th October 1984; Frankfurter Kunstverein December 19, 1984 - January 27, 1985; Haus am Waldsee Berlin February 23 - April 14, 1985. Includes illustrations of Oppenheim's sculptures, paintings and drawings throughout, alongside a complete work list, biography and various texts in German by Jean-Hubert Martin and Jim Palette as well as excerpts from a conversation. Back cover features a photograph of Oppenheim's 1983 Spiral Column (Spiralsaule), unofficially known as "Meret Oppenheim Fountain," on the Waisenhausplatz in Bern. A tall concrete column wrapped with a garland of grass over a small watercourse, the fountain provoked a petition for its removal.
very good copy.
Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim (6 October 1913 – 15 November 1985) was a German-born Swiss Surrealist artist. Oppenheim was a member of the Surrealist movement of the 1920s along with André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Max Ernst, and other writers and visual artists. Besides creating art objects, Oppenheim also famously appeared as a model for photographs by her friend Man Ray.
A a young age Oppenheim discovered the writings of Carl Jung, a friend of her father's, and was inspired to record her dreams in 1928. Her dreams would serve as important sources for much of her art throughout her life. The work of Paul Klee, the focus of a retrospective at the Kunshalle Basel in 1929, provided another strong influence on Oppenheim, arousing her to the possibilities of abstraction.
In 1932, at the age of 18, Oppenheim moved to Paris and met Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti, who after visiting her studio and seeing her work, invited her to participate in the Surrealist exhibition in the “Salon des Surindépendants,” Paris. Oppenheim later met André Breton and began to participate in meetings at the Café de la Place Blanche with the Surrealist circle. The conceptual approach favored by Marchel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia became important to her work. She continued to contribute to Surrealist exhibitions until 1960. Many of her pieces consisted of everyday objects arranged to allude to female sexuality and feminine exploitation by the opposite sex. Oppenheim’s paintings focused on the same themes. Her originality and audacity established her as a leading figure in the Surrealist movement.
Méret Oppenheim's first one-woman exhibition in the Galerie Sohulthess, Basel featured surrealist objects. In 1937, Oppenheim returned to Basel and this marked the start of her artistic block. She struggled after she met success and worried about her development as an artist. Méret Oppenheim usually worked in spontaneous bursts and at times destroyed her work. Oppenheim took a hiatus from her artistic career in 1939 after an exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin started by Rene Drouin in Paris. In the exhibition she was featured alongside many artists, including Leonor Fini and Max Ernst. She did not share any art with the public again until the 1950s. Oppenheim then reverted to her "original style" and based her new artworks on old sketches and earlier works and creations.
Méret Oppenheim's best known piece is Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) - Object (Breakfast in Fur)(1936). The sculpture consists of a teacup, saucer and spoon that the artist covered with fur from a Chinese gazelle. It was purchased by Alfred Barr for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and included the museum's first surrealist exhibition Fantastic Art: Dada and Surrealism in 1936. Oppenheim was willing to sell the piece for one thousand francs, but Barr only offered her $50 and she accepted. This was the first piece of art that the museum acquired, and Oppenheim became known as the First Lady of MoMA. The enormous success of this early work would later create problems for Oppenheim as an artist. Soon after its creation she drifted away from the Surrealists.
In 1937, Oppenheim returned to Basel, training as an art conservator in order to ensure her financial stability. This marked the beginning of a creative crisis that lasted until 1954. Although she maintained some contact with her friends in Paris, she created very little and destroyed or failed to finish much of what she created.
In 1956, Oppenheim designed the costumes and masks for Daniel Spoerri’s production of Picasso’s play Le Désir attrapé par la queue in Berne. She and artist Lilly Keller were cast as the curtains. Three years later, in 1959, she organized a Spring Banquet (Le Festin) in Bern for a few friends at which food was served on the body of a naked woman. With Oppenheim's permission, Andre Breton restaged the performance later that year at the opening of the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surrealisme (EROS), at the Galerie Cordier in Paris. Outside its original intimate setting, the performance was overly provocative and Oppenheim felt her original intention for the work was lost.
In the 1960s, Oppenheim's home base of Bern became much more important as an art center. She continued to live and work there, as well as at a second home in Carona, Italy (1968), and maintained a studio in Paris starting in 1972. She was an important figure in feminist debates in the early 1970s, although she refused to identify as a feminist.
In 1983 Oppenheim designed The Spiral Column (Spiralsaule), unofficially known as "Meret Oppenheim Fountain," on the Waisenhausplatz in Bern. A tall concrete column wrapped with a garland of grass over a small watercourse, the fountain provoked a petition for its removal. In 1985 City of Paris commissioned Spiral (Nature's Way) [Spirale (Gang de Natur) from Oppenheim for the Jardins de l'ancienne Ecole polytechnique on the Montagne Ste. Genevieve near the Pantheon. The work was based on a 1971 model and finished posthumously a few months after Oppenheim's death in 1986.
2018, English / German
Softcover, 112 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$18.00 - Out of stock
With an introduction by Hanna Magauer
In the artistic activities of Philippe Thomas (1951–1995), there was a determination to disappear: it was his procedure to transfer his title of author onto his collectors. This was the case when selling an artwork, or whenever the author’s credit was needed for a commissioned text, and in the institutional co-operations that Thomas was a participant of. With this strategy Thomas worked against his own historicization, erasing his name from the reigning European and North American art fields and with prescience Thomas “put up obstacles to block his future ‘googleability’” (Hanna Magauer). In recent years, the works and writings of the artist, who also acted on behalf of the semi-fictional agency readymades belong to everyone®, again gained greater visibility and as of current are being assigned a place in art history.
With this book, Elisabeth Lebovici elaborates on Thomas’s strategy to cede and fictionalize authorship and suggests a reading of his work that incorporates questions of gender and reproduction, the multiplicity of the subjects involved, and the unbearable disappearance of Thomas (who died of AIDS-related complications), into the process of enunciation. It is Lebovici’s suggestion that the performativity of Thomas’s work requires two versions at once: “the one where one enters into the fiction and the one where one observes the beauty of the arrangement and the plot at work. The one where one is inside and the one where one contemplates it.”
Schriftenreihe by Kunsthalle Bern, ed. by Valérie Knoll and Hannes Loichinger
Design by HIT
2017, English / German
Softcover, 96 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
$18.00 - Out of stock
“The idea behind Donnerstag was to insist on the difference between good art and bad art. I am aware of how anachronistic that sounds and how quickly it evokes the image of an old critic-pontiff wagging his authoritarian pointer finger. But even that image is founded in a misunderstanding: the caricaturesque exaggeration of the critic’s voice as dictatorial. But it’s really nothing more than that very voice. And it pronounces a judgment that is not juridical, but ideally worth nothing more than the argument at its core. It’s far more authoritarian and antidemocratic to deny a public voice the act of judgment and concede to a postheroically styled art writer nothing more than the task of pointing at something. […] Whoever just leaves it at that has also parted ways with any hope of open rivalry between arguments.” —Annika Bender
This book is an adaptation of Annika Bender’s lecture “Jump! You Fuckers!” which was presented at Kunsthalle Bern in the context of a series on overproduction and ambivalence in contemporary art. Annika Bender was one of the pseudonyms of artists Dominic Osterried and Steffen Zillig, who wrote the blog Donnerstag (now discontinued) under her name. To make the criticism she proposed possible, and make public its conditions and inherent contradictions—as well as articulate the reasons for her disappearance—it proved necessary to confer Bender to the archive.
Afterword by Hannes Loichinger
Schriftenreihe by Kunsthalle Bern
Edited by Valérie Knoll and Hannes Loichinger
Design by HIT
2017, English / German
Softcover, 64 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
$18.00 - Out of stock
The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. The shifts that occurred in the art field during this time were accompanied by explicit critique and academic analysis that aimed to make the genesis of these transformations comprehensible. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out. Expanded to include the sphere of individual aesthetic experience, these systems are not formulated as solipsism, or in terms of purposefulness, but as a means to compare relations within the productivity of open and incalculable connectivity, relations that allow aesthetic experience to be read out as the liquefied labor and lifetime of concrete others.
(Over)production and Value takes up considerations that connect Diederichsen’s previous writings, from On (Surplus) Value in Art (Sternberg Press, 2008) to Körpertreffer: Zur Ästhetik der nachpopulären Künste (Suhrkamp, 2017).
Publication series by Kunsthalle Bern, edited by Valérie Knoll and Hannes Loichinger
Design by HIT
1990, English / Dutch
Hardcover, 88 pages, 22 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition of 2500, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Museum Boymans-van Beuningen / Rotterdam
$90.00 - Out of stock
Hardcover catalogue raisonné catalogue of the idiosyncratic American sculptor Robert Gober. Published by Museum Boymans-van Beuningen & Kunsthalle Bernin in conjunction with a comprehensive 1990 touring European Museum retrospective, this informative catalogue contains a full chronological catalogue raisonné of ninety-one sculptural objects created by Gober since 1980, as well as copious photographic documentation of installation works in colour and black and white. It also contains colour pages of documentation of his metamorphosing studio "chests" painting project. Along with texts by Ulrich Loock, Karel Schampers, and Trevor Fairbrother, the book contains an exhibition history, bibliography and biography of the artist. A very generous and very uncommon, major book on the work of this great American artist.
Softcover, 26 x 14 cm, 336 pages (colour ill. throughout)
Published by
Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Paraguay Press / Paris
$30.00 - Out of stock
American artist and filmmaker Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), who was a former assistant to Gregory Markopoulos and mentored by Stan Brakhage, has gained a solid reputation among cinema enthusiasts for his films made during the 1960s and 1970s. His work was associated with the earliest examples of the so-called 'structural' film movement, when Land worked alongside filmmakers like Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits, though he distanced himself from this context very early on. Land himself stresses his education as a painter and his early efforts recalling Abstract Expressionist painting through exposing the physical properties of celluloid (Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc., 1965-1966). His visual genius was paired with sophisticated wordplay in his subsequent output. Inspired by educational film (Remedial Reading Comprehension, 1970), advertisement and television, Land parodies the experimental and structural film-movement itself, as is manifest in his 1975 Wide Angle Saxon. Virtuosity in the use of Duchampian double entendres, puns and wit, make these films hilarious at times, and gave Land a special status in the then burgeoning American avant-garde cinema. Thirty years after On the Marriage Broker Joke - his last completed film (with the exception of two rarely screened video-shot projects made in the mid-1980s, Noli Me Tangere and The Box Theory, and the unfinished Undesirables, 1999) - a new film, Dialogues (2007-2009), was shown at the Kunsthalle Bern. Dialogues is an episodic series of short films informed by the artist's study of folklore, myth, history and the theology of all major religions, including Gnosticism and cabala. With a healthy dose of irony and a proudly irreverent attitude toward all kind of orthodoxies Land readily applies the structure of the Platonic dialogue to explore themes of reincarnation, art criticism, and Tantra. In the filmmaker's own words Dialogues "concentrates on the events of Owen Land's life in 1985, when he returned to Los Angeles after spending a year in Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Okinawa, Japan. […] It was a time for much soul-searching about his relationships with women (and with strippers). There are flashbacks to that very formative period, the 1960s when 'we won the sexual revolution' as one character says. Some of the episodes contain events which are more speculative, or imaginative, than literally real." The film also includes musings about Land's artistic forebears and pastiches of other films, including The Graduate, Red Eye (called Craven Death Maven), most of Kenneth Anger's films, and complex allusions to the films of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. This book is constructed around Land's "Dialogues" and features the "Dialogues" script, interviews between Land and Julia Strebelow and Scott Foundas, and an essay by Chris Sharp. Edited by Philippe Pirotte and Julia Strebelow. Co-published by Paraguay Press and Kunsthalle Bern on the occasion of the exhibitions: Owen Land: “Dialogues” Kunsthalle Bern 4.4. – 17.5.2009 Owen Land: “How can you believe anything he says?” KW Berlin – Kunst-Werke Berlin e.V. – Institute for Contemporary Art 22.11.2009 – 24.1.2010