Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
Martin Heidegger, Glenn Gould, Jacques-Louis David, Cy Twombly, Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein: characters that Francesco Arena has chosen or rediscovered in multiple contexts over the time recur in this book. Ranging from philosophy, to music, to visual arts, they embrace the whole world of knowledge.
This first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri aims to highlight the themes and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects at GAMeC, Bergamo; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; Swiss Institute, New York; Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; and the National Gallery, London.
The book highlights the main characteristics of the collective trauma that gave rise to Rachel Whiteread’s project for GAMeC. The psychoanalysts Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis map out a composite picture, starting from the sense of vulnerability and collective loss associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.
This book, with follows the eponymous exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, is constructed as a story, with a prologue, four acts, and an epilogue: an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative.
Dreaming Alcestis is an artist’s book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. It features a commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley’s 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?
What if clay is the future and the future is clay? Curators Chus Martínez and Filipa Ramos brought together a group of artists to think and create through this old, maleable and fascinating matter. The result was materialized in an exhibition and book format entitled Feet of Clay.
Edited by di Cloé Perrone
Texts by Adrienne Edwards, Ekow Eshun, Francesco Freddolini, Wangechi Mutu, Cloé Perrone, Ilaria Puri Purini
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2025, English, hardcover, 30 x 24 cm, 202 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-80-5
The title of this rich publication, published on the occasion of the solo exhibition of the Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu at the Galleria Borghese—the first time in the century-old history of the Villa for a living female artist—evokes the dual nature of Mutu’s practice: poetic and mythological, yet deeply connected to contemporary social and material contexts. “Black soil”—rich and malleable under the rain, almost like clay—appears across multiple geographies, including the Secret Gardens of the Galleria, which resonate with the artist’s imagination. From this soil, the sculptures seem to emerge, as if molded by a primordial force, giving shape to stories, myths, memories, and poems. The metaphor underscores the generative and transformative power of her work: rooted in materiality, yet open to multiple future interpretations.
Wangechi Mutu’s intervention introduces a new vocabulary into the historical and symbolic architecture of the Galleria Borghese. Through sculpture, installation, and moving image, the artist proposes an innovative approach to the museum space—one that challenges hierarchy, permanence, and fixed meaning. Her works question the visual weight and authority of the collection through strategies of suspension, fluidity, and fragmentation. In doing so, the museum is no longer presented as a static container of objects, but as a living organism, in continuous transformation, shaped by loss, adaptation, and reconfiguration.
Accompanied by a text by curator Cloé Perrone analyzing the context and themes that informed the exhibition’s conception, the volume is enriched by four additional essays by Adrienne Edwards, Ekow Eshun, Francesco Freddolini, and Ilaria Puri Purini, as well as a conversation between Eshun and the artist. A rich selection of illustrations allows the readers to retrace the exhibition, which unfolded in the Gallery’s sumptuous rooms and gardens, all the way to its extramural presence at the American Academy.
Photos: Andrea Lops