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
SAT 12—4 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
2006, English/German
Hardcover, 88 pages, 265 x 213mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$45.00 - Out of stock
Marc Camille Chaimowicz subtly intervenes in the gallery space, altering the atmosphere and décor of the environment. This catalogue, devised in collaboration with the graphic designer Adeline Morlon, reflects his working method, developing quiet, multi-perspective views of a spatial installation. Chaimowicz’s environments embrace the domestic sphere, incorporating interior design, ceramics, wallpaper and textiles. The exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen documented in this book shows works spanning the years 1975 to 2005 and includes objects, drawings, photo collages and paintings.
‘Spaces and their potentialities of allowing ideas to come into being forms the central pillar of interest for the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz… for the first time ever in a German institution, he has realized his ideas in a richly faceted manner and shown his work to an interested and curious audience.’ (Rita Kersting)
English and German text.
2012, English
Softcover, 176 pages (47 colour, 100 b&w ill.), 210 x 270 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$50.00 - Out of stock
German artist Michaela Meise's first monograph, "Ding und Korper" focuses on two groups of work which address respectively the inanimate object and the human body. Working with the formats of video, drawing, performance and sculpture, Meise examines the principles of sculptural and architectural ordering, both from the perspective of their creative execution as well as in relation to their political and social context. Minimalist-style sculptures investigate the purpose and meaning of objects and tools, and in a series of self-portrait photographs Meise pays homage to artist Valie Export.
2012, English/German
Softcover, 168 pages, 215 x 273 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$44.00 - Out of stock
In this publication Claire Fontaine show both old and new works that deal with economic structures as a closed and irrational system that is intent on defending the status quo using any necessary means and at any price. The artist collective Claire Fontaine was formed in Paris in 2004. The name is taken from a well-known French manufacturer of school notebooks and writing paper. Claire Fontaine describe themselves as "ready-made-artists" who work with existing forms and materials. They analyse the crisis of individuality in contemporary art using video, installation, sculpture and text, denouncing the passivity of politics in the process.
2012, English/German
Hardcover, 280 pages, 280 x 200mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$47.00 - Out of stock
For Morgan Fisher a form of appropriation, transformation, irony and lightness are also part of a reflection on the history and the techniques of seeing.
This way of reading (art) history and autobiographical traits are characteristic of Morgan Fisher’s long awaited writings. In it, Fisher has interwoven each of his works in a cosmos of intellectual figures, autobiographical and historical references.
This ‘autobiographical part’ is complemented by articles on Carl Andre, Blinky Palermo and many more.
2012, English/German
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 247 pages, 207 x 288 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$47.00 - Out of stock
Morgan Fisher became prominent in the early 1970s as an experimental filmmaker in the structuralist milieu, whose main interest was not the content of that depicted but rather the analysis of the medium itself. In the mid 90s Fisher turned to monochrome painting and the installation of monochrome paintings. Fundamental questions on the history and aesthetic of perception as well as its inscription in genres and technologies are central in all of Morgan Fisher's work. Forgoing the illusionism of narrative, Fisher reveals the conditions of perception in his films and reflects the creation and the nature of the filmic image. His post-conceptual painting deals with the relation between colour, size and form of an image, frames, the relationship of figure and ground as well as the observer's point of view - themes that have been contested since the abstraction of modernism and minimalism.
2003, English/German
Softcover, 360 pages, 210 x 295 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$45.00 - Out of stock
This title presents, for the first time, the extensive œuvre of Austrian-born artist Heimo Zobernig - an artist who exploits the full spectrum of current forms of artistic expression as almost nobody else can. This publication presents a standard reference work on the artist with a comprehensive index that provides an overview of the last 25 years of his work. Each of his works is documented in photographs and explained within its context, communicating the unpretentious nature of Zobernig’s art.
2008, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 143 x 212 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$28.00 - Out of stock
A collection of texts by critics (Lucian Harris, "The Art Newspaper"), curators (Ian White, Whitechapel and Emily Pethick, Casco Projects) and artists (Morgan Fisher and Dan Graham), this publication takes on the timely challenge of conceptualizing a museum designed to exhibit film and video works whose meaning is contingent on the context of cinema.
2003, English/German/Czech
Hardcover, 248 pages, 170 x 245 mm
Published by
Kölnischer Kunstverein / Köln
Walther König / Köln
$28.00 - Out of stock
This book is the first retrospective of Julius Koller, born in 1939 in Piestany (former Czech Republic), working in Bratislava. Since his beginnings in the middle of the 60s, the Slovak artist Julius Koller has understood his work as a "cultural process". His influence on the younger artist generation as "artist for artists" is not to be underestimated.
2012, English/German
Softcover, 64 pages (33 colour ill.), 190 x 235 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$29.00 - Out of stock
Tomma Abts is one of the most outstanding painters of her generation. Her paintings are created in a slow and strict process in which she applies purely geometric forms, layer upon layer, with oil and acrylic paints, always using the same portrait format of 48 x 38 cm. Isolated recognisable edges and translucent layers make Abts' works a reflection on the painting process itself. The catalogue brings together her older as well as her most recent works. Drawings that have been created parallel to her canvases over the past years and are thus far not well known will be published here for the first time. This publication is a visual continuation of her work, designed by the artist herself, and contains installation views as well as numerous large-format illustrations.
2008, English/German
Softcover, 80 pages, 213 x 264 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$29.00 - Out of stock
This catalogue of recent work by the rigorous Iranian-born, Berlin-based conceptualist Nairy Baghramian was produced on the occasion of her spring 2008 solo museum show in Baden-Baden, Germany. According to essayist Karola Grässlin, "In addition to art-historical and literary issues, her works interrogate political and social systems of power."
2011, English
Hardcover - cloth bound, 144 pages (168 color ill), 31.5 x 24.4 cm
This title is now out-of-print.,
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$60.00 - Out of stock
Situated at the intersection between art, design and social history, The Inventors of Tradition is a fascinating and original visual study of the history of the Scottish textiles industry since the 1930s. For decades, textiles were Scotland’s primary industry and export, and Scottish wool, cashmere, tweed, leather, lace and of course tartan has been celebrated and sought across the world for centuries. Conceived as a sort of dossier or scrapbook, this volume brings together design swatches, product shots, film stills, interviews and the archival materials of individuals and companies in the Scottish textiles trade. In response to this wealth of material, the artist Lucy McKenzie and designer Beca Lipscombe (of Atelier) have produced a series of new works including clothing, furniture and accessories in collaborative partnership with Caerlee Mills, Begg Scotland, Hawick Cashmere, Laura Lees, Jannette Murray, Mackintosh, Muehlbauer and Steven Purvis.
2010, English/German
Fold-out poster, w. various colour and b/willustrations, 119,2 x 84 cm, folded into DIN A4 format
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$23.00 - Out of stock
This poster edited by Michael Krebber shows documentation material, images and
correspondence around a performance project entitled “Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad”
by Jack Smith that took place at the Cologne Art Fair in 1977.
2011, English/German
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$26.00 - Out of stock
Haris Epaminonda’s work is essentially determined by the collage technique which she has extended by combining pictures, films, photographs, sculptures, earthenware vessels, pieces of woodwork, Chinese porcelain, antique figures, and other found objects from a wide range of sources to complex installations. Epaminonda deliberately avoids all references to her objects’ date and place of provenance and meaning. The viewer is rather thrown back upon himself and his own associations.
Epaminonda’s work questions aspects of time, motion, stillness, as well as of representation and presentation.
2008, English
Softcover, 142 pages (72 colour, 5 b&w ill.), 275 x 210mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$32.00 - Out of stock
Starting from the installation and series of glass paintings entitled Modernology, this catalogue presents Pumhösl’s ongoing involvement reflecting and integrating motifs, issues and materials of early non-western avant-gardes.
While Sabeth Muchmann and Jan Verwoert are discussing Pumhösl’s works and strategies from two different perspectives, Thomas Hackners contribution provides an insight into the work of Japanese book artist Onchi Koshiro, whose abstract formal language has become both source and subject of Pumhösl’s mode of depiction.
2012, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 234 x 259 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$39.00 - Out of stock
This volume includes two bodies of work by German painter Monika Baer (born 1964): her paintings of playing cards, dollar bills and stylized breasts floating against an abstract wash, and more recent works in which web-like patterns are cut out of the canvas, exposing the stretcher behind.
2009, English
Softcover, 144 pages (90 colour illustrations), 265 x 210 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$42.00 - Out of stock
Annette Kelms photographs show objects, people, places and a multitude of other motifs captured on an analogue camera. In contrast to the initial impression of practicality and minimal aesthetics, these motifs prove to be disconnected from their original contexts, estranged through interventions or enriched in arranged constellations. These subtle fractures set a kind of chain reaction in motion, opening up spaces for thought and association of lyrical and humorous quality. This clearly distinguishes Kelm from those artists collected under the "conceptual photography" label. The catalogue marks Annette Kelms first solo institutional exhibitions in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland and brings together more than eighty photographs from 2001 to the present in an overview of her work to date.
2004, English/German
Softcover, 136 pages, 210 x 298 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$50.00 - Out of stock
This book documents a performance that involves numerous visits - not open to the public - on a Katamaran conducted before her exhibition at Cologne Kunstverein which Cosima von Bonin photographs and publishes here as a pictorial stories.
2012, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 215 x 280 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$39.00 - Out of stock
Rethinking the one day event Cosey Complex, which Maria Fusco devised and organised with Richard Birkett at the ICA in London in 2010, this new book will be the first major publication discussing and theorising Cosey as methodology. Contributors include: Martin Bax, Gerard Byrne, Daniela Cascella, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Diedrich Diederichsen, Graham Duff, Anthony Elms, Chris Kraus, Patricia MacCormack, Clunie Reid, Rob Stone, Corin Sworn and Cosey Fanni Tutti.
2003, English/German
Softcover, 93 pages (fully illustrated), 25 x 19 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$34.00 - Out of stock
Book on the artist Jack Goldstein with an essay by John Miller, an interview by Morgan Fisher and aphorisms by Jack Goldstein in English and German. The book also includes a comprehensive list of works from within the time period 1971 - 1984 and a complete and commented list of Jack Goldstein's films.
2011, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 148 x 240 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$26.00 - Out of stock
Juliette Blightman takes apparently insignificant everyday situations as the starting point for her works. By making subtle performative interventions into a setting with objective givens, Juliette Blightman uncovers diverse, mostly personal levels of experience which viewers can also perceive by revising their own worldview and that presented by Blightman.
2009, English
Softcover, 162 pages (illustrated throughout), 26 x 21 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$50.00 - Out of stock
First comprehensive monograph on the Los Angeles based artist Richard Hawkins,
published on the occasion of the exhibition "Of two minds, simultaneously" by
Richard Hawkins at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam. With an essay by Bruce
Hainley, an interview with the artist and an introductory text by the curator Anne
Demeester. The book is produced in collaboration with Galerie Daniel Buchholz,
Corvi-Mora, Greene Naftali, Richard Telles Fine Art, de Appel arts centre.
2012, English
Softcover, 48 pages (17 colour ill.), 235mm x 150mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$12.00 - Out of stock
Subtly and with ease, the American painter Matt Connors (born 1973) draws on art historical, literary and musical references which he places in a new context.
Connors employs a repertory of forms familiar from the history of abstract painting: basic geometrical forms, rapid brushstrokes and hatches along with seemingly playfully applied letters and digits. Connors uses the potential of abstract painting and when viewed, his works are constantly open to new interpretations.
The artist takes up quotations and painterly solutions, but continuously expands on them by transcending the boundary of the picture: canvases become objects and painting is put in relation with the surrounding space by means of a quasi theatrical staging.
Connors produces self-referential paintings - a kind of narrative minimalism that invites new interpretations of image, object and space.
2012, English
Softcover, 526 pages (282 colour ill.), 210 x 277 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$46.00 - Out of stock
"Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?" is a reader that brings together essays, artists' writings and works, and countercultural publications to examine the juncture of the political and the erotic during the 1960s and 70s. Adopting as its starting point the postwar perception of Scandinavia as a socialist utopia of sexual freedom, it explores how the avant-garde artistic and cultural production of the time gravitated towards sexual and political liberation. "Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?" is the conclusion of a four-year research project, and includes many texts published in English here for the first time, by philosophers, artists, psychologists and theorists such as Knut Ove Arntzen, Stan Brakhage, Norman O. Brown, Valie Export, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Herbert Marcuse, Jonas Mekas, Henry Miller, Juliet Mitchell, Katti Anker Moller, Jorgen Nash, Havard Friis Nilsen, Claes Oldenburg, Elise Ottesen-Jensen, Wilhelm Reich, Yvonne Rainer, Jacqueline Rose, Barney Rosset, Barbara Rubin, Jens Jorgen Thorsen and Otto Weininger.
2012, English
Softcover, 87 pages, 99 x 145 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$18.00 - Out of stock
My Best Thing. This intimate publication focuses on Frances Starks pivotal feature length video My Best Thing, premiered at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 a digital video animation, which traces the development of two sexual encounters that progress into conversations about film, literature, art, collaboration and subjectivity.British curator Mark Godfrey captures the density of this recent work by Stark with an in-depth essay considering the artists use of online sex-chat rooms as vehicles for her creative process.