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, Sat 12–5
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Fiction
Australian Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction
Australian Poetry
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Anthropology
Anarchism
Socialism / Anarchism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism / Women's Studies
Gender Studies / Sexuality
Anthropology
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"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.
$.00 - Out of stock
The eternal clean out! New items weekly.
https://worldfoodbooks.com/category/sale
Published by World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
A World Food Books gift voucher is redeemable in our Melbourne bookshop or via our webshop (here). An e-voucher (printable pdf) will be sent to your purchase email address (please notify us if you wish to have the voucher sent to an alternate address and wish us to fill in the receiver's details on the card).
Gift vouchers can be purchased in increments of $20 (Australian Dollars) and the total amount can simply be added to by increasing the quantity in your shopping cart. eg. A quantity of 5 gift vouchers will result in an item total of $100 - a $100 gift voucher. Simply click "ADD TO CART" 5 times, or update your quantity in the shopping cart.
If you wish to purchase multiple, separate gift vouchers in one go, please just email us and we can personally prepare and email you a payment request.
Please note: Please select Pick-Up on gift voucher purchse to avoid any postage charges. Accidental postage charges will be refunded right away!
Thank you.
For any questions, please don't hesitate to email: [email protected]
1969, English
Slipcase portfolio of 64 loose plates, 38.5 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Rhinoceros Press / New York
$400.00 - In stock -
Original 1969 deluxe slipcase edition of Tomi Ungerer's controversial classic from 1969, Fornicon, a provocative portfolio of Ungerer's stunning line drawings of mechanophilia — machine sex. The ingenious and diverse pleasure devices seem to symbolize the absurdity of human desire, caricaturing love and lust mechanized by industrial society. One of the most celebrated works of erotic illustration of the 20th Century, and a masterpiece of 1960s counterculture, Fornicon ruffled so many feathers when first published by Ungerer and Richard Kasak that the award-winning French illustrator had to flee New York.
Heavy back slipcase w. gold-foiling contains the complete 64 sheets (62 illustrated plates, 1 double-sided title/colophon page, 1 double-sided text introduction by American poet and literary critic John Hollander).
"Black Power/White Power, with its Kama Sutra suggestion of simultaneous fellatio, has an undeniable sexual undercurrent, but Ungerer also addressed the sexual revolution head-on, assimilating the fluid line and stark patterning of Aubrey Beardsley in wildly phallocratic drawings of baroque pleasure devices and mechanical means of penetration. Published as an expensive folio, The Fornicon, these sprightly images—a literal, if perverse, expression of the desire to make love rather than war—provoked a strong negative reaction, effectively suspending Ungerer’s career as a children’s book artist (his works, he says, were banned from libraries) and precipitating his departure from New York..."—NY Books
Tomi Ungerer (b. 1931) is an award winning French illustrator and a writer in three languages. He has published over 140 books ranging from much loved children's books to controversial adult work; from the fantastic to the autobiographical. He is known for sharp social satire and witty aphorisms. He is renowned for his iconic Advertising campaigns and political posters against the Vietnam War and Racial Injustice which were representative of the burgeoning political consciousness in New York in the 1960’s when he was based at the time. His political engagement has continued to this day in campaigns against Racism and Fascism, for Nuclear disarmament, Ecology and numerous Humanitarian causes.
Good copy with wear to the edges/corners of the slipcase, some discolouration to the gold foil, and several plates have some light foxing and light corner creasing, but majority of contains Very Good. Contents are complete.
1971, French
Hardcover (clothbound in slipcase), un paginated, 34.5 x 27 cm
Ed. of 1000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jean-Jacques Pauvert / Paris
$100.00 - Out of stock
Lovely copy of Les Merveilles de la Nature, the 1971 slipcased, clothbound volume of erotic drawings by Argentine artist Leonor Fini (1918-1996), published in a limited edition of 1000 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris in 1971. Gold gilt–lettered red clothbound hardcover housed in red cloth covered card slipcase, pink laid endpapers, featuring some of Fini's most provocative drawings reproduced in black, red, and sepia on medium matte wove paper with accompanying poems by Cuban poet, author, and playwright Severo Sarduy.
Leonor Fini (1907–1996), an Argentine painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women, is considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century and also one of the most misunderstood.
Fini had no formal artistic training. Born in Buenos Aires, she travelled extensively from a young age, living in Milan and then moving to Paris in 1931-32 where she was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, becoming acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired much of her work, and also Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. She had her first one person show in Paris when she was twenty-five at a gallery directed by Christian Dior. Her work caught on fast and was included in the pivotal and groundbreaking Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the MOMA in 1936 while at the same time she had her first New York exhibition at the avant-garde Julien Levy Galley. Surrealist artists in France came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although she did not consider herself a surrealist, nor a part of any particular artistic movement. Fini preferred to stake her own claim on modernism with a vision that owes more to the farthest shores of her imagination than to any affiliation with art trends, schools or movements. The originality of her art as well as her intelligence, famous wit and charisma accorded her celebrity status in the Paris art world and beyond beginning in the late thirties. Her panache and glamour, once they found a place in the collective imagination of the time, turned her into a much-publicized fashion and feminist icon. Always controversial, with as many detractors as admirers, she lived and painted consummately on her own terms.
In Paris in 1939 she curated the inaugural exhibition of her friend Leo Castelli’s first gallery (of surrealist furniture) and shortly thereafter, just before the German occupation, she traveled with André and a new lover to Arcachon in the southwest of France to begin waiting out the war. She remained there for almost a year with Salvador and Gala Dali before moving to Monte Carlo where she met the young Italian diplomat, Stanislao Lepri who became one of the great and enduring loves of her life. As the war intensified she moved with Stanislao to Rome where she lived, worked and formed close friendships with Anna Magnani, Luchino Visconti and other leading figures of world of art and letters. After the Liberation of Paris in 1946 she returned there to live and work for the remainder of her life, exhibiting extensively around the world.
The predominant themes in Leonor Fini’s art are sexual tensions, mysteries and games. One of her favored subjects is the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male, and in many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx to which she felt a strong identification. She was also a renowned portraitist, and among her subjects were such friends as writers André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Genet, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas), such actresses as Anna Magnani and Suzanne Flon, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, film director Luchino Visconti and artists Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington.
Her genius for stage and screen design is evident in her numerous ground breaking theater decors with their elaborate conception, costumes and phantasmagorical masks. She designed for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palais de Crystal, and choreographer Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, as well as over seventy productions at theaters in Paris between 1946 and 1969. She had a unique talent for film design and created costumes for Fellini's 8 ½ as well as for Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire d'O.
The provocative and much-publicized life of Leonor Fini was pure theater. Her story is that of a hard-won struggle to forge her life as a woman artist in a man’s world and to invent herself on her own terms. It is the story of a woman possessing exceptional independence, a highly original vision and great personal magnetism who lived passionately through her art and friendships and in the process became a feminist role model.
Very Good copy in Very Good slipcase with only light marking. Slipcase not pictured.
2026, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 31 x 23 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunsthalle Wien / Vienna
Kestner Gesellschaft / Hannover
$98.00 - In stock -
Edited by Eva Birkenstock.
Texts by Rhea Anastas, Annie Ochmanek, and Kristian Vistrup Madsen; an interview with the artist by Bruce Hainley; and an introduction by Michelle Cotton and Eva Birkenstock.
Since the early 1990s Richard Hawkins has developed a singular practice based on the dynamics of desire and the intense pleasure of looking. Published on the occasion of a major survey organised by Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Richard Hawkins: Potentialities documents painting, collage, sculpture and video produced between 2000 and 2025 – including series inspired by Forrest Bess, Tatsumi Hijikata, Antonin Artaud – favorites of Hawkins – but also Pierre Bonnard!
The title Potentialities refers to the capacity for something—anything—to be or become otherwise: the possibilities of being and becoming are limitless. In Hawkins’s work, this idea operates as both concept and method. Across paintings, collages, and videos, images and subjects remain in flux, cut, layered, and recombined into open-ended constellations.
In short, desire and fandom emerge not as fixed themes but as an ongoing, non-teleological field—excessive and in constant formation—in which meaning is continuously produced through relations rather than fixed references. Collage, understood as the bringing together of disparate elements, structures Hawkins’s “promiscuously referential” works. It operates as a mode of “cruising” through imagery from popular culture, literature, and the annals of art history, driven by juxtaposition, chance, and intuitive association.
The book includes writings by Hawkins about his work and research, essays by Rhea Anastas, Annie Ochmanek, and Kristian Vistrup Madsen, as well as an interview with the artist by Bruce Hainley.
Richard Hawkins (b. 1961, lives in Los Angeles, USA) has had solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunsthalle Wien (2025/26); LOEWE’s FW24 Men’s Show, Paris (2024); Tate Liverpool (2014); Le Consortium, Dijon (2013); the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (both 2010); de Appel, Amsterdam (2007); and Kunstverein Heilbronn (2003). He has also participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including Artists Space, New York (2023); Bonner Kunstverein (2019); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2014); and the 2012 Whitney Biennial, New York. His work is held in major international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Kistefos Museum, Norway; LOEWE Foundation, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nevada Museum of Art; Palm Springs Art Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hawkins is a Professor of painting at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.
2026, English
Softcover, 276 pages, 27.9 x 22.2 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$145.00 - In stock -
Edited with text by Susanne Pfeffer. Text by Valeria Gordeev, Quinn Latimer, Christoph Menke, Cord Riechelmann, Ann-Charlotte Gunzel.
From “knitting pictures” to upside down palm trees and mannequin heads in glass boxes, Trockel’s caustic oeuvre defies classification.
Finally here, the enormous MMK catalogue! German multimedia artist Rosemarie Trockel rose to fame in the 1980s with her “knitting pictures” made with industrial weaving machines. In 1999 she was the first woman to exhibit at the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Working in a variety of media, both sardonic and uncanny, her constructions always include her own critical and humorous gaze at social regimes and political structures and at nature – making definitions, restrictions, paternalism, and violence due to gender visible. While scientifically sound and precise, her observations always include her own critical and sometimes humorous gaze as a vital component as she not only captures but highlights ambivalences. This is a comprehensive overview of Trockel's oeuvre, featuring works from all creative phases, including works made especially for a recent exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.
Highly recommended!
2026, English / German
Softcover, 560 pages, 29.7 x 22.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$100.00 - In stock -
This anthology tells the story of the influential Berlin exhibition space MD72 between 2007 and 2018, featuring more than 70 exhibitions. Over 190 contemporary artists, designers, curators, and writers are featured in this anthology. MD72 was founded by the gallerist and collector Alexander Schröder; its events reflected the repercussions of contextual art and post-institutional critique, as well as the cultural conditions of post-reunification Berlin shaped by post-feminism, postcolonial thought, and queer strategies. In addition to extensive visual documentation of exhibitions and artworks, the book offers a compendium of eyewitness accounts, essays, exhibition notes, interviews, excerpts, and commentaries from a wide range of authors.
Features: David Adamo, Jana Euler, Mark Leckey, Yves Saint Laurent, Michael Sanchez, Kai Althoff, Matias Faldbakken, Ang Lee, Peter Saville, Mathis Altmann, Barney Farmer, Lee Healey, Gunter Lepkowski, Magnus Schaefer, Tariq Alvi, Keith Farquhar, David Lewis, Mathias Schormann, Art & Language, Paul Feigelfeld, Klara Lidén, Alexander Schröder, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Valentina Liernur, Yasmine Schroeder-Elgarafi, Red Krayola, Marta Fontolan, Beca Lipscombe, Nora Schultz, Charles Asprey, Catherine Francblin, Hilary Lloyd, Elfie Semotan, Atelier E.B, Andrea Fraser, Hannes Loichinger, Gedi Sibony, Lutz Bacher, Luca Frei, Stefan Lux, Katharina Sieverding, Nairy Baghramian, Gelatin, Danny McDonald, Eric Banks, General Idea, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Leith, Amy Sillman, Dirk Bell, Isa Genzken, Eric N. Mack, Avery Singer, Kirsty Bell, Liam Gillick, Lucy McKenzie, Andreas Slominski, Sean Snyder, Bernadette Corporation, Marc Glöde, René Magritte, Gerry Bibby, Julian Göthe, Victor Man, Lucie Stahl, Julien Binet, Goldin+Senneby, André Masson, Frank Stella, BLESS, Fanny Gonella, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mladen Stilinović, Anna Blessmann, Isabelle Graw, Nick Mauss, Josef Strau, Peter Saville, Wade Guyton, Ken Okiishi, Studio Manuel Raeder, Juliette Blightman, Florian Hecker, Birgit Megerle, Juergen Teller, Cosima von Bonin, Manfred Hermes, John Miller, Philippe Thomas, Mark Borthwick, Georg Herold, Pierre Molinier, Simon Thompson, Michael Bracewell, Charline von Heyl, Sarah Morris, Torey Thornton, Janet Burchill, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Ariane Müller, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jennifer McCamley, Ull Hohn, Jill Mulleady, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tom Burr, Yngve Holen, Jeanette Mundt, Rosemarie Trockel, David Bussel, Karl Holmqvist, Geoff Nees, Donald Urquhart, Caroline Busta, Judith Hopf, Georgie Nettell, Mona Vătămanu, Florin Tudor, Michael Callies, Alex Hubbard, Albert Oehlen, Donna Huddleston, Roberto Ohrt, Francesco Vezzoli, Sergej Jensen, Alex Israel, Ken Okiishi, Danh Vo, Ellen Cantor, Robert Jarosz, Henrik Olesen, Heinz Peter Knes, Merlin Carpenter, Sergej Jensen, Paulina Olowska, Steven Warwick, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Helen Johnson, Dietrich Orth, Michal Wasaznik, Alan Charlton, Stefan Kalmár, Daniel Pies, Marianna von Palombini, Scott Cameron Weaver, Doryun Chong, Tobias Kaspar, Manfred Pernice, Hannah Weinberger, Claire Fontaine, KAYA, Kerstin Brätsch, Kirsten Pieroth, Thilo Wermke, Anne Collier, Debo Eilers, Falke Pisano, Stephen Willats, Carole Condé, Karl Beveridge, Annette Kelm, Simon Popper, Susanne M. Winterling, John Kelsey, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Ashes Withyman, Isabelle Cornaro, Pierre Klossowski, Stephen Prina, David Woodard, Enrico David, John Knight, Mark Prince, Christopher Wool, Jacques de Koning, Valérie Knoll, Josephine Pryde, Cerith Wyn Evans, Gigiotto Del Vecchio, Jutta Koether, Manuel Raeder, Alex Zachary, Mark Dion, Stefan Korte, Reena Spaulings, Heimo Zobernig, Eliza Douglas, Andrzej Kostenko, Jeroen de Rijke, Lukas Duwenhogger, Christian Kracht, Willem de Rooij, Alexander Schröder, Martin Ebner, Kitty Kraus, Martha Rosler, Dominic Eichler, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Annette Ruenzler, Marianna von Palombini, Florian Zeyfang, Colin de Land, J. St. Bernard, Dominic Eichler.
2022, English
Softcover, 198 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$62.00 - Out of stock
This publication assembles a selection of texts produced between the years 2005 and 2020, starting with The Non- Productive Attitude (2005), his prominent reflections on the anti-productive attitude in the Cologne art scene of the time. The experience of having to write the essay overnight within a few hours, and without any time for revision, triggered his interest in exploring forms of unintentional writing, and consequently the replacement of the intentional author by an unconscious writer / producer. This mode of automatic writing has manifested itself until today, and has become the core of Strau’s artistic practice.
2026, English
Softcover, 168 pages. 20.4 x 14 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$35.00 - In stock -
Jean Ray’s 'The Last Canterbury Tales', first published in French in 1944, makes no pretence of finishing Chaucer’s masterpiece but instead works toward a denouement of its own that reveals an unexpected act of storytelling underpinning this collection. After 600 years, Geoffrey Chaucer and his 14th-century pilgrims overcome space and time to return to the Tabard Inn in Southwark, freshly cleansed of their sins. This time it is a new cast of storytellers picking up where the others had left off – a motley crew that includes a Prioress with a taste for executions and a madman who once made the mistake of asking after the Uhu. Also among them is a new listener: Tobias Weep, secretary of the Upper Thames Book Club, who has stumbled onto their impossible gathering, pinned to his chair by the impossible weight of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s talking tomcat on his lap.
Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. A pivotal figure in the “Belgian School of the Strange,” he authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, along with his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction.
2026, English
Softcover, 488 pages, 20.3 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$82.00 - In stock -
Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979 is an expansive anthology focused on concrete poetry written by women in the groundbreaking movement’s early history. It features fifty writers and artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the United States selected by editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre.
Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979 takes as its point of departure Materializzazione del linguaggio—the groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women curated by Italian feminist artist Mirella Bentivoglio for the Venice Biennale in 1978. Through this exhibition and others she curated, Bentivoglio traced constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to “reactivate the atrophied tools of communication” and liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and the strictures of the patriarchy and normative syntax.
The works in this volume evolved from previous manifestations of concrete poetry as defined in foundational manifestos by Öyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer, and the Brazilian Noigandres group. While some works are easily recognised as concrete poetry, as documented in canonical anthologies edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams in the late ’60s, it also features expansive serial works that are overtly feminist and often trouble legibility. Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959–1979 revisits the figures in Bentivoglio’s orbit and includes works by women practicing in other milieus in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America who were similarly concerned with activating the visual and sonic properties of language and experimenting with poetry’s spatial syntax.
Artists and writers include Lenora de Barros, Ana Bella Geiger, and Mira Schendel from Brazil; Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Liliana Landi, Anna Oberto, and Giovanna Sandri from Italy; Amanda Berenguer from Uruguay; Suzanne Bernard and Ilse Garnier from France; Blanca Calparsoro from Spain; Paula Claire and Jennifer Pike from the UK; Betty Danon from Turkey; Mirtha Dermisache from Argentina; Bohumila Grögerová from the Czech Republic; Ana Hatherly and Salette Tavares from Portugal; Madeline Gins, Susan Howe, Liliane Lijn, Mary Ellen Solt, and Rosmarie Waldrop from the US; Irma Blank and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt from Germany; Chima Sunada from Japan; and Katalin Ladik and Bogdanka Poznanović from the former Yugoslavia.
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21.5 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$84.00 - In stock -
Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979 is an essential document of a decade of formative work by Michael Asher. Originally published in 1983, the book presents 33 works through the artist’s writings, photographic documentation, architectural floor plans, exhibition announcements, and other ephemera.
Asher did not create traditional art objects; instead, he chose to alter the existing institutional apparatus through which art is presented, creating work dependent on the architectural, social, or economic systems that undergird how art is produced and experienced. For example, in 1974, he removed the partition wall dividing the office and gallery space of the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles. In another work from 1978, Asher had a bronze replica of a nineteenth-century sculpture of George Washington moved from the exterior of the Art Institute of Chicago to a room in the museum that housed eighteenth-century art, changing its location, but also its function from a public monument to an indoor sculpture, as it was originally intended.
Due to its site specificity and immateriality, Asher’s work ceased to exist after an exhibition, which makes this highly sought-after book the definitive mode through which one can gain insight into the work he made during this period. As the artist states in the introduction: “This book as a finished product will have a material permanence that contradicts the actual impermanence of the art-work, yet paradoxically functions as a testimony to that impermanence of my production.”
Initiated by Kasper König, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 was originally co-published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and was largely shaped by Asher’s close collaboration with art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who succeeded König as editor of the press.
Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers
2026, English
Softcover, 432 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$82.00 - In stock -
Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Dissident Sex and Cruising Cultures examines the influence of cruising cultures on architecture and urban life, unfolding a typology of spaces produced by sexual – primarily gay – subcultures. From the appropriation of sites such as parks, public restrooms, and streets to purpose-built spaces like sex clubs, bars, and bathhouses, as well as the new form of virtual dérive generated by geosocial dating apps, cruising has subverted the libidinal cartography and use of the modern metropolis.
The book considers these spatial practices through the lens of artistic avant-gardes that have emerged at the intersection of sex, art, and architecture. It follows the eponymous curatorial project initiated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault, and Charles Teyssou, which traveled from Paris to Venice and on to New York, Fire Island, and Stockholm.
Features Andreas Angelidakis, Monica Bonvicini, Tom Burr, Shu Lea Cheang, Victoria Colmegna, DYKE_ON, General Idea, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Henrik Olesen, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Hannah Quinlan + Rosie Hastings, Carlos Reyes, Prem Sahib, Jaanus Samma, S H U Í (Jon Wang + Sean Roland), Steven Warwick, Robert Yang, Trevor Yeung, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation), Studio Karhard, Etienne Descloux, Horace Gifford, Pol Esteve + Marc Navarro, Madelon Vriesendorp, Samuel R. Delany, Hal Fischer, Gayle Rubin, Joan Nestle, David Wojnarowicz, and more...
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou are a Paris-based curatorial duo. Their recent projects include Paris Orbital, a series of events at the Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce, and the Conversations series for Paris+ par Art Basel in October 2023.
2026, English
Hardcover, 212 pages, 22 x 26 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$105.00 - In stock -
The reputation as an auteur that Paul Virilio (1932–2018) enjoys today derives from the work he did for his Bunker Archeology. When, in the second half of the 1950s, he began photographing abandoned Second World War bunkers along France’s Atlantic coast, he was working with glass as an artistic medium. In 1966, he presented his photographs to the public for the first time in the magazine architecture principe, which he co-edited. At the time, he was particularly interested in the architectural aspects of these wartime installations. He saw the bunkers as 'harbingers of a new architecture', which he sought to capture in the term 'cryptic architecture'. The first exhibition of Virilio’s Bunker Archeology was staged at the Centre Pompidou in 1975, while the museum was still in the process of being established. His seminal book was published in conjunction with this. It laid out all the motifs of his philosophical thinking: military space and communications warfare, camouflage and acceleration, a scrupulous reading of the present coupled with a desire for philosophical speculation. Although it is almost fifty years since the work was first published, Bunker Archeology is still full of connections to the present. To coincide with an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, a new edition of the book is being published in French, English, and German.
Paul Virilio (1932–2018), French philosopher, urbanist and critic of the media society. His most important works include War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1984) and Polar Inertia (1990).
2025, English
Hardcover, 140 pages, 29 x 21 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$85.00 - In stock -
‘Studio Snapshots’ comprises a series of black-and-white photographs taken in the studio of Dutch artist Mark Manders, where finished and unfinished works reflect various stages of the creative process. Notably, the selection of images gives a sense of the artist’s approach and method, with various tools, objects, implements, and materials appearing in the photographed spaces alongside his creations in progress.
2026, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 29 x 22 cm
Published by
Astrup Fearnley Museet / Oslo
WIELS / Brussels
Roma / Amsterdam
$98.00 - In stock -
Edited by Helena Kritis and Solveig Øvstebø
Published by Astrup Fearnley Museet, WIELS, and Roma Publications, the catalogue brings together three newly commissioned essays approaching Bacher's art from distinct yet intersecting perspectives. Kate Nesin takes The Betty Center — Bacher's archive of nearly 300 black binders, later realised as an artwork — as a point of departure to examine her engagement with archives, containers, and readymade forms. Juliane Rebentisch reads Bacher's work as a sustained practice of opacity that stages accumulation, self-exposure, humour, and citation to unsettle fixed identities and disrupt the clichés through which meaning is usually secured. Finally, Emily LaBarge reads Bacher through the logic of the pun, showing how her works hinge on double meanings and perceptual slippages that make uncertainty the condition of viewing. Burning the Days: An Exhibition occupies a distinct place within the lineage of Bacher’s artist books. It is the first major publication on Bacher produced entirely after her death and without her direct involvement or design input.
Design: Julie Peeters.
2026, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 28 x 24 cm
Published by
Bill / Brussels
$86.00 - In stock -
‘Bill’ is an annual magazine that prioritises visual reading of its photographic stories without the distraction of text. The 192 offset pages are printed in CMYK, silver, and black and white on a dozen different paper stocks, along with some Japanese bound signatures. Contributors to this sixth instalment include conceptual artist Rosemarie Trockel, Croatian artist Hana Miletić, RareBooksParis, architect and designer Thorben Gröbel, Japanese artist Yuji Agematsu, French artist Claude Closky, California-based artist Sam Contis, Dutch photography studio Blommers/Schumm, photographer Michael Schmidt, Swiss artist Beat Streuli, and photographer Adrianna Glaviano.
2011, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21.6 x 13.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$52.00 - In stock -
“The surrealist’s approach to sexuality was original and important … I feel this book will amaze us all.” —George Melly
Are women’s orgasms more intense than men’s? What did André Breton think of homosexuality? Can love be separated from physical desire?
In 1928 a group of surrealist writers and artists held twelve round table discussions to address these questions. Calling them “researches into sexuality,” their bizarre and humorous conversations are now made available in this new edition in all their surreal and salacious detail. Their research spanned the most critical period for surrealism, a time of bitter political disputes, echoed in the intensity of these meetings and in the range of participants, including André Breton, Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Péret and Pierre Naville.
Well before the so-called sexual revolution, their erotic exchanges broke sexual taboos and encouraged surrealists to openly share the libidinal themes they explored in their writing and art. In doing so, JoAnn Wypijewski writes in the new introduction, they are revealed as “lovers and prigs, fantasists and humanists, adventurers in mind if not always in flesh—flawed, foolish, brilliant, clangingly sexual human beings.”
Afterword by Dawn Ades
Introduction by JoAnn Wypijewski
Edited by José Pierre
Translated by Malcolm Imrie
"These discussions are absolutely fascinating."—Kathy Acker, author of Blood and Guts in High School
"... readers are in for a treat: a cascade of opinion, at times insightful, frequently infuriating, often comedic."—Zoe Strimpel, The Observer
José Pierre was a playwright, novelist and art historian. He belonged to the postwar Paris surrealist group that formed around André Breton. He was a member of Actual, an archive for the dissemination of the secret history of surrealism.
2026, English
Softcover, 344 pages 21 x 14 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$69.00 - In stock -
From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, 'Paying Attention' is the first collection of essays devoted to her incisive, provocative, and singular reflections on art and culture.
'Paying Attention' gathers more than fifty of the best and varied examples of Lynne Tillman’s writings in reference to art and culture published over the course of forty years. In essays that operate outside typical categories or genres, Tillman reflects on forms including film, painting, photography, poetry, and fiction, as well as notions of fame, originality, embodied viewing and thinking, collective activity, aging, illness, American identity, cultural politics, modernity, strangeness, and time. Such is the stuff that relates art to life, and life to art.
Collected mainly from museum and gallery catalogues, artists’ books and monographs, her column in 'Frieze', and magazines including 'Aperture' and 'Artforum', these meditations on artists and writers, in the broadest sense of these labels, collide as a portrait of our cultural moment. Tillman’s inventive use of language and lateral thought, her ability to evoke conditions of the larger world in often just two thousand words on a specific artwork or individual, make her one of the most significant critics of our time. As she acknowledges, in a piece on the artist Robert Gober, “In writing on art, words reach for other words, phrases, idioms, and through them more images and ideas leap out.” In her introduction, Elizabeth Schambelan notes that a hallmark of Tillman’s writing alongside artists is an “elegant rendering of complexity,” and in approaching Tillman’s body of work and thought, Schambelan herself imbricates the art, voice, and language of criticism.
2001, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 22. 9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
University of Texas Press / Texas
$84.00 - In stock -
Surrealist artist Marx Ernst defined collage as the “alchemy of the visual image”. Students of his work have often dismissed this comment as simply a metaphor for the transformative power of using found images in a new context. Taking a wholly different perspective on Ernst and alchemy, however, the author persuasively demonstrates that the artist had a profound and abiding interest in alchemical philosophy and often used alchemical symbolism in works created throughout his career. A revival of interest in alchemy swept the artistic, psychoanalytic, historical, and scientific circles of th elate 19th and early 20th centuries, and the author sets Ernst’s work squarely within this movement. Looking at both his art (many of the works she discusses are reproduced in the book) and his writings, she reveals how thoroughly alchemical philosophy and symbolism pervade his early Dadaist experiments, his foundational work images in surrealism, and his many collages and paintings of women and landscapes, whose images exemplify the alchemical fusing of opposites.This pioneering research adds an essential key to understanding the multilayered complexity of Ernst’s works, as if affirms his standing as one of Germany’s most significant artists of the 20th century.
"M. E. Warlick's book is a unique and highly significant contribution to the literature on modern art and modern culture in general."—Linda D. Henderson, Professor of Art History, University of Texas at Austin
" ... when M. E. Warlick discusses {Ernst's] early art and the Surrealist context, she is authoritative... Her own scrupulously researched chapters on the artist's formative years and pre-Surrealist paintings, together with her abbreviated history of alchemy, its literature and the"occultation of Surrealism" which began in the 1920s, are useful additions to the existingscholarship."—TLS, 21 September 2001
2023, English
Softcover, 408 pages, 17 x 11 cm
Published by
Another Gaze Editions / UK
$44.00 - In stock -
Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni). In Duras's hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression. Yet, Duras is never concerned only with her own work, or even with the broader project of making cinema: her preoccupations are global, and the global crucially informs her perceptions of the way in which she works. With the audiovisual as a starting point, her encyclopaedic associative powers bring readers into contact with subjects as diverse as the French Communist Party, hippies, Jews, revolutionary love, madness and freedom, across four decades of an oeuvre that is always in simultaneous dialogue with the contemporary moment and world history.
1988, German
Softcover (staple–bound), 20 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Goethe-Institut / Münich
$35.00 - In stock -
1985 German catalogue dedicated entirely to the magnificent photographic work of Wols. Illustrated throughout with his striking still life, portrait, and Paris street images, accompanied by text from Laszlo Glozer.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter, photographer, engraver, and graphic designer. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, Wols was close to Surrealism, and is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement, and of Informal art in Europe. He moved to France when he fled the Hitlerian regime, with a recommendation from the artist-teacher Moholy-Nagy. Illegal immigrant, he was considered as a deserter and a stateless person, arrested many times by the French police. In 1936, Wols received, with Léger and Rivière's help, a limited resident permit, working as a photographer — his unusual fashion and interiors photographs were sold as postcards and printed in many international fashion magazines. Immediately after the beginning of the Second World War, Wols was enprisoned with many Germans in different French internment camps, where Wols realized many surrealist drawings and watercolours that he is now well-known for. He spent most of the war trying to emigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him to alcoholism. After the hype from the war had died down, he had his first exhibition of watercolors in December 1945 at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, where despite the lack of commercial success he made an impression. His paintings represented a rejection of figuration and abstraction, and a projection into a metaphysical plane. In the years following the war, Schulze concentrated on painting and etching. His health declined severely towards the end of the 1940s; in 1951 he died of food poisoning at the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, after releasing himself from hospital against medical advice. After his death his works were shown at the Kassel documenta (1955), documenta II (1959) and documenta III (1964).
Very Good with some cover wear/age.
2026, English
Softcover, 344 pages, 25.4 x 17.78 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$46.00 - In stock -
A landmark anthology of Francesc Tosquelles's intellectual, clinical, and political writings, many available in English translation for the first time.
Edited by Joana Maso, translated by Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem
Often consigned to legend, the life of Francesc Tosquelles reads as an adventure story of clinical, political, and collective experimentation around healing institutions. Joining the Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole psychiatric hospital in Nazi-occupied France, Tosquelles invented what would become “institutional psychotherapy” with poets, film critics, photographers, and psychiatrists including Jean Oury, Agnès Masson, Frantz Fanon, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Éluard.
This first anthology of Tosquelles’s writings shines a light on his forgotten history, from his engagement as a psychiatrist during the Spanish Civil War alongside anti-Franquist and anti-Stalinist communists, to his progressive return to Catalonia following his role in the “cultural revolution” of “institutional psychotherapy” in France. Through translations of texts never before available in English, Tosquelles’s powerful voice reminds us how important politicized relations to institutions are in our times of sick institutions, scapegoating of strangers, and globalized war.
2024, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 22 x 17 cm
Published by
Thin Man Press / London
$74.00 - In stock -
Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time.
"The re-appearance of this glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic is a gift… Cahun’s writing is stylish, playful and prescient, peopled with angel slang, flowering disavowals, God’s lipstick and an infinite layering of masks."—Daisy Lafarge, author.
In 1930, Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her partner, artist Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) published their surrealist masterpiece, Aveux non Avenus, translated here as Cancelled Confessions and available in English for the first time in twenty years. Susan de Muth’s revised translation of Cancelled Confessions has a new introduction by art historian Amelia Groom which contextualizes it within contemporary queer discourse.
"It’s a surrealist, trans, queer, autofiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things. It’s a text, and a life, felt as connection and at the same time completely singular."—McKenzie Wark, author.
'The kaleidoscopic text is pieced together from diverse fragments… there are philosophical and subversive theological musings, aphorisms and fables, letters and dialogues, dreams and hymns, nightmares and jokes,' writes Groom. The book’s nine sections are prefaced by dreamlike photomontages (reproduced in high definition here) which reflect, illuminate and converse with the verbal content. Upon publication, Aveux non Avenus simply baffled all but a few of Cahun’s friends and admirers, leading Cahun to describe herself as, ‘An unwanted Cassandra’. Now, however, is the time of the remarkably prescient Cahun and Moore.
"Cahun was a pioneer of gender-bending role-playing…eerily ahead of her time she has attracted an almost cult-like following."—The late David Bowie
Cahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified Andre Breton in the 1920s when she appeared in a Paris café with her head shaved and painted gold. Having moved to Jersey in 1938, Cahun and Moore waged a mischievous two-person resistance campaign against the occupying Nazi forces from 1940. Finally caught and imprisoned in 1944, they were sentenced to death in 1945, saved at the very last moment by the armistice.
1973, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 18 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Books / Melbourne
$65.00 - In stock -
First printing from 1973 of this photo-book dedicated entirely to the streets of the suburb of Carlton, Melbourne, by Australian photographer Les Gray (1920 - 2013). With an introduction by poet Garrie Hutchison (b. 1949) titled "Canning Street, Carlton, August 1973", this handsome little landscape album of snapshots captures the people, terraces, and shopfronts of early 1970s Drummond, Rathdowne, Cardigan, Faraday, Lygon, Gratton, Station, Canning, and Elgin streets. Published by Sun Books.
Good—Very Good copy with light wear/age.