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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
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.
2016, English / German
Softcover, 352 pages, 20 x 12.8 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$58.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
The first comprehensive analysis of Loretta Fahrenholz’s filmic work.
Seven of the artist’s films (2010–2016) are portrayed in synopses through separate series’ of images.
John Kelsey and Caroline Busta analyze the artist’s experimental films, which defy the distinction between fiction and documentary and propose new forms for a post-cinematic present.
Produced in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Zürich on the occasion of Fahrenholz’s solo exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (25 September 2016 – 1 January 2017).
English and German text.
2020, English / German
Softcover, 280 pages, 23 x 23 cm
Published by
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - In stock -
Who—or what—is Reena Spaulings? Since 2004 the name has stood for various collective artistic activities. Initially Reena Spaulings was the title of a novel written by an undisclosed number of anonymous authors from the circle of the artist collective Bernadette Corporation. Around the same time, a commercial gallery with an exhibition space in New York was founded, which since then has represented artists such as Merlin Carpenter, Jutta Koether, Claire Fontaine, and Klara Lidén. Also in 2004, an artist collective was formed that operates under the name of the fictional artist Reena Spaulings, creating collective paintings that are both reflective of the system and self-deprecating.
This catalogue is Reena Spaulings' first comprehensive publication and contains, among other things, a richly illustrated chronology of the collective's work to date, published following the exhibition HER AND NO at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Reena Spaulings’s first institutional collaboration with a museum. The presentation focused on the collective’s artistic work, including new works, new versions of existing series of works, and existing works that deal with the status of the artist in society in a wider sense.
Profusely illustrated with contributions from Simon Baier, Caroline Busta, Anna Czerlitzki, Yilmaz Dziewior and Claire Fontaine. Edited by curator Anna Czerlitzki.
2019, English / German
Softcover, 64 pages, 23 x 30 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$90.00 - Out of stock
Grey pictures by Richter from the years 1965 to 1974 as well as Spiegel, Grau / Mirror, Grey from 1991 are juxtaposed with photos by Michael Schmidt of Waffenruhe (1985–1987) and Berlin Wedding (1976–1978). An exploration of the colour grey through both artists work.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Gerhard Richter and Michael Schmidt at Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne (1 December 2018 – 8 March 2019).
English and German text.
2020, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24 x 29.6 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$110.00 - In stock -
An enormous and definitive hardcover appraisal of Michael Schmidt, Berlin’s greatest chronicler in the postwar period.
Author of now-classic photobooks such as Waffenruhe and Berlin-Wedding, Berlin-based photographer Michael Schmidt (1945-2014) was acclaimed in his lifetime for his black-and-white, documentary-style depictions of his native city. This is the first full appraisal of his work, featuring numerous images of working material such as work prints or book dummies, as well as archival material—invitation cards, posters and exhibition views. Essays by Ute Eskildsen, Janos Frecot, Peter Galassi, Heinz Liesbrock and Thomas Weski, who worked closely with Schmidt on various projects during his lifetime, complement these materials.
Schmidt was born on 6 October 1945 in East Berlin, five months after the German surrender. His family crossed to West Berlin before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. His earliest series on Berlin, Stadtlandschaft (Urban Landscapes) (1974-75) and Berlin, Stadtbilder (Berlin, Urban Images) (1976-80), established the idiom he would pursue for the rest of his life.
2005, English / German
Softcover, 192 pages, 22.5 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$200.00 - Out of stock
This wonderful, major book on Rosemarie Trockel published on the occasion of the exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: Menopause at the Museum Ludwig, Köln, Oct 29 2005 - Feb 12 2006, and MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, 19 May - 6 Aug 2006, seemed to disappear from print rather fast, quickly becoming a collector's item. A catalogue raisonné of sorts, collecting Rosemarie Trockel's work from 1980 to 2005 (sculpture, wool works, drawings, publications, garments, photography, video - including very rarely seen objects). Probably the best and most valuable books produced on one of Germany's most incredible artists, 'Post-Menopause' was realised in close cooperation with Trockel herself, and features bilingual (English and German) essays by Brigid Doherty, Silvia Eiblmayr, Barbara Engelbach and Gregory Williams.
Very highly recommended!
Rosemarie Trockel was born in Schwerte, Germany in 1952. She studied in the Werkkunstschule in Cologne until 1978. Trockel’s oeuvre is diverse in themes and mediums, which include works on paper, ‘knitted paintings’ and sculptures. Though it is difficult to associate a particular style with her work, several concurrent themes can be identified within her oeuvre, such as the female role in society, the trademarks and symbols as social signifiers and decorations and finally, her fascination with ethnographic and scientific studies, which are often expressed through her sculptures. Trockel has become best known for her machine-generated ‘knitted paintings’–knitted woolen material placed on a stretcher–in which she challenges traditional notions of painting, feminine roles in society and culture at large, as well as art making itself. Additionally, her incorporation of references to popular culture through logos or symbols and sometimes text is yet another way to comment on the commodification of art and on the subjectivity of language and visual representation. Rosemarie Trockel lives and works in Cologne.
2005, English / German
Softcover, 184 pages, 15.2 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$260.00 - In stock -
As new copy of the out-of-print and fantastic 2005 artist book Alien Hybrid Creatures by German painter Michael Krebber.
Alien Hybrid Creatures addresses, amongst other things, the historical figure of the dandy--and among the dandies implicated is the spawning sea anemone on the cover. It functions as a reading list for the Seminar "Dandyism I/II (Düsseldorf Academy of Art) 2001/2002, with additional material from Krebber's seminar "Geniuses and Dandies/Historical and Theoretical Reflections" 2001. Such material includes the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bernhard Willhelm, Robert Bresson, Kai Althoff, Charles Baudelaire, Odilion Redon, Merlin Carpenter, Devince, Josephine Pryde, Kenneth Anger, Albert Camus, Cosmia Von Bonin, Jack Smith, John Waters, Susan Sontag, Russ Meyers, Marcel Broodthaers, and French & Saunders (amongst many more).
Alien Hybrid Creatures was published on the occasion of Michael Krebber's legendary lecture "Puberty in Painting", delivered in the context of Renate Goldmann's seminar at the Institute of Art History at the University of Cologne in 2003.
Essay by Oswald Wiener.
Designed by Markus Ziegler in cooperation with Yvonne Quirmbach.
Now a very scarce collector's item. Some light shelf wear only.
2022, English / French
Softocver, 160 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$57.00 - Out of stock
Published on occasion of Thea Djordjadze's first exhibition in a museum in France at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne (MAMC+), 5 Feb – 15 May 2022. Entitled ‘Remember and Witness’ (‘Se souvenir et témoigner’ in French), this eponymous catalogue unveils materials, archives and writings from the artist in the first part, while the second combines exhibition views from the Gropius Bau in Berlin and MAMC+ to apprehend her sense of installation and composition in two opposite spaces. An interview with the artist by MAMC+ director, Aurélie Voltz, and an essay by the art historian, Thomas Boutoux, question her practice, influences and works.
English and French text.
2022, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$59.00 - Out of stock
In these essays and conversations, Daniel Birnbaum explores what conceptual artist Daniel Buren referred to as the ‘frames of art’. As a director of institutions, Birnbaum has organized events inside and outside some of the most significant art institutions in Europe, including the Venice Biennale, the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Moderna Museet and the Centre Pompidou. Like few other curators he has pushed the boundaries of the studio, the exhibition, and the museum in an attempt to find new ways to ‘frame’ art. This volume contains examples of curatorial approaches to education, exhibition-making and the presentation of collections.
Daniel Birnbaum, born 1963 in Stockholm, is a Swedish art curator and an art critic.
2022, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 27.5 x 20.8 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$62.00 - In stock -
An artist's book of fungal portraiture.
Dutch artist Magali Reus’ (b. 1981) new photographic series, Knaves documents an array of mushrooms in headshot-like close up. As though in an al fresco portrait studio, the fungi are posed against backdrops of colourful vintage t-shirts – synthetic intrusions into the natural landscape. This beautifully designed artist book sets images from the series within the sepia-tinted pages of a 1990s telephone directory for Park Cities – an area of Dallas whose name acts as shorthand for the way in which urban design domesticates nature for ease of human use. Novelist, Kathryn Scanlan’s text zooms in on a series of fleeting quotidian dramas, mobilising a cast of evocatively named characters that, like Reus’ fungal protagonists, bloom and then disappear.
2021, English / German
Hardcover, 64 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Staatliche Graphische Sammlungen / München
$68.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published to accompany Michael E. Smith’s exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlungen, München, September 2—October 24, 2021.
Michael E. Smith makes sculptures out of cast-offs, waste and other residues of our consumer society. He assembles and manipulates this found material in an unusual way. He isolates objects, makes changes to their form and seeks out the limits of their imaginative power. His presentations are characterised by an intense yet sparse choreography of the exhibition space.
Extensively illustrated in colour throughout.
2018, English
Softback (2 vol. in slipcase), 96 pages, 20.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$56.00 - In stock -
Normative Models is two books in a slipcase comprised of an identical sequence of images and are only differentiated by the printed texts.
Catalogue 01/2018 contains, The Trial of Lucullus by Bertolt Brecht (English translation from 1943): and Catalogue 02/2018 includes, Applied Fantastic: On the Polish Women’s Magazine Ty I Ja by David Crowley.
These variants serve to demonstrate the complex symbiosis between image, context, and meaning.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Christopher Williams: Normative Modes at kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (5 May – 29 July 2018).
Williams, who is originally from Los Angeles, is currently professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The artist has presented a number of solo exhibitions under the title Christopher Williams. For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle, versions of which have been shown in Germany at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2005), the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2010), and the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2011). Williams’s work was first presented in Hanover as part of group exhibitions at the Sprengel Museum in the early 1990s.
2021, English / German
Hardcover, 392 pages, 28 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Städtisches Museum Abteiberg / Mönchengladbach
$85.00 - Out of stock
For the first time, the 35 legendary box catalogues of Städtische Museum Mönchengladbach have been published as a book. Museum director Johannes Cladders developed the idea of catalogues in the form of a box with Joseph Beuys in 1967. Understated in their initial appearance, the grey boxes provide an unconventional and pertinent overview of the international vanguard art of the period, including seminal movements such as Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Arte Povera, and Pop Art. Until 1978, Cladders worked closely with exhibiting artists to create such catalogues, which radically re-envisaged the traditional exhibition and museum publication. They embody the participatory approach of their time and instance a vision of a porous democratic work. Viewers are invited to actively participate in this artistic and institutional endeavour and engage both intellectually and physically. Some of the boxes include posters, booklets, documentation and texts, while others comprise multiples.
Artists included are Blinky Palermo, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Hollein, Piero Manzoni, Hanne Darboven, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stanley Brouwn, Brecht/Filliou, Jasper Johns, Richard Long, Panamarenko, James Lee Byars, Braco Dimitrijević, Jannis Kounellis, Lawrence Weiner, Giulio Paolini, and Gerhard Richter, among many others.
Researched by Susanne Rennert, designed by Petra Hollenbach, with photographs documenting all catalogues by Tobias Hohn & Stanton Taylor, and introductory essays by Susanne Rennert and Susanne Titz. English and German text.
2022, English
Hardcover, 188 pages, 28 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$99.00 - Out of stock
The immediately out-of-print first monograph on Los Angeles-based Swiss Uruguayan artist Jill Mulleady (born 1980).
Mulleady creates critically acclaimed paintings whose abiding mood suggests pent-up tensions between isolate figures in incongruously lush, sumptuously chromatic landscapes and domestic interiors. Recalling early modernist painters of intensely loaded psychic atmosphere such as Félix Vallotton and Edvard Munch, and perhaps informed by her training in theater, Mulleady's backdrops, rendered in her characteristic tones of gray, crimson and absinthe green, are generally invented, or may sometimes draw on the contours of her immediate environment, such as the parks of Los Angeles; her figures, meanwhile, seem lost in contemplation, alienated, even despairing at times. This beautifully produced volume presents the artist's paintings from 2015 to 2021, alongside texts by Julia Kunzi, Philipp Kaiser, John Kelsey, Valérie Knoll, and features a special cover design by Mulleady.
2013, English
Hardcover, 348 pages, 27.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$500.00 - Out of stock
Now exceptionally rare and collectible, Phenotype is the first comprehensive monograph on the biologist Jochen Lempert, who has worked as a photographer since the early 1990s.
Since the early 1990s, the German photographer and biologist Jochen Lempert (born 1958) has used analogue, black-and-white photography to convey his gently reverential vision of nature and sentience—whether that of animals, plants or humans. Often grainy, sometimes verging on abstraction, and sometimes focusing minutely on the activity of some tiny creature, his photographs exude a simple pleasure in fleeting tranquility. Lempert has also taken a quietly particular stance on the presentation of his work: in exhibitions, his images are presented unframed and tacked up on walls, and his books (among them Recent Field Work and Coevolution) are always immediately identifiable for their modest but exquisite design, printing and paper. Continuing this tradition of gorgeous bookmaking, Jochen Lempert: Phenotype reproduces 450 of his works, most of them arranged in groups and sequences, from more than 20 years of artistic production.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Hamburger Kunsthalle Gallery of Contemporary Art, 22 June – 29 September 2013.
Very Good copy, light tanning to spine.
2010, English / Italian / German
Softcover (plastic printed cover, fluro hair-tie), 88 pages (w. 40 page inserts, 1 fold-out poster), 26.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Mousse / Milan
Walther König / Köln
Museion / Bolzano
$240.00 - Out of stock
The very quickly out-of-print, first, only edition of this great Isa Genzken book, published on the occasion of the artist’s first survey exhibition in an Italian museum, at Museion, Bolzano, 11/09/2010 – 16/01/2011.
This volume takes a radical departure from the standardised format of the retrospective catalogue. While still being lavishly illustrated and offering an in-depth look at the quest for the modern which has informed the radical and diverse oeuvre of Genzken for four decades, it also gives a sense of the tremendous influence and inspiration of her body of work for three generations of artists. Profusely illustrated with Genzken's works in glossy colour, work sections spanning here entire career are puncuated by artist contribution inserts from Lawrence Weiner, Simon Denny, Nick Mauss, Monica Bonvicini, Jutta Koether, Mark Leckey, Elizabeth Peyton, and Cerith Wyn Evans. Comes in printed thick-plastic jacket with very Genzken fluro hair-tie "binding".
Fine, almost As New copy.
2017, English / German
Softcover, 431 pages, 20.3 x 27.1 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$65.00 $15.00 - In stock -
This publication documents the first forty years of exhibitions at the Museum Ludwig through an archive of installations and ephemera. It includes impressions from all the directors of the institution as well as the architects of the building. The conceptual starting point is the anniversary exhibition "We Call It Ludwig: The Museum Is Turning 40!" (2016), which is reflected here in a complete overview of all the works on display. For the anniversary exhibition, which was jointly conceived by the director and all the museum’s curators, twenty-five international artists and artist collectives were invited to engage in depth with the institution and to react to the question of what the Museum Ludwig means to them.
Participating artists included Georges Adéagbo, Ai Weiwei, Ei Arakawa & Michel Auder, Minerva Cuevas, Maria Eichhorn, Andrea Fraser, Meschac Gaba, Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke, Diango Hernández, Candida Höfer, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Kuehn Malvezzi, Christian Philipp Müller, Marcel Odenbach, Ahmet Ögüt, Claes Oldenburg, Pratchaya Phinthong, Alexandra Pirici & Manuel Pelmuş, Gerhard Richter, Avery Singer, Jürgen Stollhans, Rosemarie Trockel, Villa Design Group, Christopher Williams.
The expansive archive portion of this large book includes important work by countless artists spanning 40 years.
Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior
2012, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 22.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
Walther König / Köln
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first edition of the now out-of-print artist's book by Henrik Olesen, Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, published on the occasion of the Wolfgang-Hahn-Prize awarded to him in 2012. Illustrated throughout in detail (colour and b/w) with an essay by Josef Strau and an introduction by Carla Cugini this book provides a literary, artistic and scientific insight into Olesen's work.
As New copy.
2018, English / German
Softcover, 192 pages, 24 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$300.00 - In stock -
Stunning and immediately out-of-print comprehensive new monograph on the work of Sam Gilliam, published on the occasion of the exhibition from the Kunstmuseum Basel June 9-September 30, 2018.
Between 1967 and 1973, American abstract painter Sam Gilliam (born 1933) undertook some of the most radical work of his six-decade-plus career, a period culminating in Gilliam's representing the US at the Venice Biennale in 1972. The work, including his Martin Luther King series and Jail Jungle series, reflected the fractured political climate of this period. It was also during this period that Gilliam began his beveled-edge paintings. In these iconic works, Gilliam poured acrylic paint directly onto the unprimed canvas, which he folded and crumpled while the paint was still wet, then stretched the canvas over a chamfered frame. The work in Sam Gilliam: The Music of Color conveys the influence of the DC Color Field school on Gilliam's art, and his blending of the lines between sculpture and painting.
Profusely illustrated throughout with stunning colour documentation of all of the exhibited works, installation views and details, with texts by Lynette Yiadiom Boakye, Larne Abse Gogarty, Rashid Johnson, Rafael Squirru.
Edited by Jonathan P. Binstock and Josef Helfenstein.
Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi) is one the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. For an African-American artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Gilliam has subsequently pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation has been the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions continue to take on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.
As New copy, still sealed.
1998, English / German
Hardcover, 222 pages, 24.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kunsthaus Zürich / Zürich
Walther König / Köln
$580.00 - Out of stock
"Between 1977 and 1997 Martin Kippenberger created 178 posters, mostly for his exhibitions but also announcing concerts, parties, lectures, readings and birthdays." Very rare first 1998 hardcover edition catalogue raisonné of posters designed by, and for, German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997). Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Martin Kippenberger - Frühe, Bilder, Collagen, Objekte, die gesamten Plakate und späte Skulpturen" held at Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, September 12 - November 15, 1998, this profusely illustrated catalogue of his prolific poster work has become an invaluable resource addressing this important aspect of the German artist's practice. All posters reproduced in colour and b/w with texts by Bice Curiger and Martin Kippenberger and a full checklist of the posters. Also includes a lovely fold-out exhibition check-list/poster inserted illustrating many further works including many paintings and sculptures. Text in English and German.
Good copy with some edge wear to the cover and rubbing/tanning to spine. Interior Very Good.
2018, English
Softcover, 236 pages, 27 x 21.2 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
S.M.A.K. / Gent
Pinakothek der Moderne / Munich
$98.00 - Out of stock
After his debut in 1964 the Belgian painter, Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) developed a working method that was as obstinate as it was tactical, in which the common distinctions between abstraction and figuration dissolve in the poetic binding of the work with the everyday.
This catalogue to the first posthumous retrospective exhibition is conceived as a classic monograph on the life and work of the artist.
Alongside a detailed account of the development of Keyser’s oeuvre, the catalogue contains an comprehensive illustrated chronology as well as, for the first time, a chapter on drawing and photography.
Equally interesting are quotes by artists such as Tomma Abts, Maria Eichhorn, Thomas Scheibitz and James Welling (among others) about their influential colleague.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Raoul De Keyser: Oeuvre at Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent in 2018/19, and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich in 2019.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 862 pages, 17.4 x 22 cm
Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
D.A.P. / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
This monumental hardcover publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of the late twentieth century. Having left East Germany in 1961, where he had already established a reputation as a Realist painter, Gerhard Richter went on to attend the Dusseldorf Academy, striking out on a radical new path and changing the history of painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism.
Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist's work, presenting the photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter's photographs - sometimes found, sometimes original - have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting. The images closely parallel, year by year, the subjects of Richter's paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter's working process, this monumental new edition (the second US edition), which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition, features 783 multi-image sheets, each reproduced full page and in full color.
Introduction by editor Helmut Friedel.
As New. Out-of-print.
2021, English
Hardcover, 212 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - Out of stock
An enchanting collection of Post-it note drawings done for a child's school lunchbox.
This volume assembles 200 drawings made by Berlin-based Ed Atkins (born 1982), internationally known for his video art. Drawn on Post-it notes during weekday mornings over breakfast and slipped into his daughter's lunchbox before school, these delightful and colorful illustrations are reproduced here in their original formats.
Ranging from the playful to the graphic and even sometimes grotesque, they mirror both the absurdity and mundanity of everyday love. Some contain, simply, the words "I love you" or a quick sketch of a sunset, while others seem to treat the format as a sort of canvas, with vividly surreal scenes filling the Post-it note from corner to corner. A true artist's book, this charming volume acts as a playful testament to, and a tender snapshot of, fatherly love.
2021, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 21 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunsthalle Basel / Basel
$70.00 - Out of stock
Joachim Bandau’s early sculptural works from the years 1967–1974 remain as strange and singular today as when he first made them. At once technoid and bodily, minimal and monstrous, often with couplings or hoses that resemble weirdly organic orifices and tentacles, these works address questions of agency, control, technology, and history in a way that is increasingly relevant to the present.
This catalogue has been published on occasion of the exhibition of the same name, 02/03/21 – 06/06/21, Kunsthalle Basel. With beautiful photographic documentation of the exhibition, alongside archival exhibition, work and studio images, a catalogue raisonne of works from this period, alongside texts by Elena Filipovic, Martin Herbert, Renate Wagner, a conversation between Joachim Bandau and fellow German artist Alexandra Bircken, and more. Designed by Petra Hollenbach.
2021, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 30 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
This extensive hardcover overview of Swiss Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri's (b. 1930) 60-year-long career, presents reproductions of archival material as well as rarely seen artworks from Spoerri's incredible artistic history of installations, assemblages, (including his famous "snare works"), performances, editions, and other activities as a protagonist of Fluxus, Nouveau réalisme and Eat Art. Includes texts by Ingried Brugger, Veronika Rudorfer, Hans Peter Hahn, Barbara Räderscheidt, Daniel Spoerri, Katerina Vatsella.