DOROTHÉE SELZ — Les Mondes sucrés, Centre Culturel Jacques Prévert, Villeparisis, 1980

Dorothée Selz, Les Mondes sucrés de Dorothée Selz. Centre Culturel Municipal Jacques Prévert, Villeparisis, 2 February–30 March 1980. Published 1979/80. Staple-bound exhibition catalogue; 28 pages, 18 × 24 cm; colour and black-and-white offset printing. Printed by Europrint, Choisy-le-Roi.

An early exhibition catalogue documenting Dorothée Selz’s work with sugar, confectionery, decoration and edible sculpture, published for her 1980 exhibition at the Centre Culturel Jacques Prévert in Villeparisis. The exhibition and catalogue are recorded in Selz’s own archive.

Selz emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s around a group of artists — including Antoni Miralda — who used food, colour, ritual and temporary public situations as artistic material. Their activities overlapped with the wider field of Eat Art, in which cooking, consumption and social exchange became part of the work rather than merely its subject.

The catalogue reflects that expanded field. Its pages move between photographs of Selz’s large sugar constructions, confectionery traditions, architectural fantasies, popular imagery, erotic photography and ritual food. Rather than isolating the artworks from their references, the publication lets these different image worlds sit beside one another.

The sculptures themselves were temporary by design. Sugar could dissolve, food could be consumed, and an installation could disappear once the event ended. The catalogue therefore carries a slightly unusual responsibility: it does not simply illustrate permanent objects elsewhere. In many cases, the photograph becomes one of the principal surviving forms of the work. Material → sculpture → event → photograph → catalogue.

Selz’s practice was already concerned with that instability. Her edible works were conceived in relation to architecture, occasion and participation rather than permanence, and her later career continued to develop temporary food-based installations and public situations.

For The New Rare, the catalogue works because it sits between several categories without requiring any of them to be overstated. It is exhibition documentation, an early record of Eat Art practice, and a visual object produced around work whose disappearance was built into its form. The sculpture does not survive intact. The publication does.

Condition: Good. General handling and age wear, with rubbing, surface marks and visible creasing to wrappers. Edge and corner wear throughout. Rear wrapper with handling marks and creases. Internally generally clean, with occasional handling wear consistent with age.

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