Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
This compelling artist’s book is built around KOOL (“cabbage” in Dutch), an original font designed by Reus, somewhere between a plant alphabet and concrete poetry. The publication draws on the type specimen book tradition to present new typefaces.
Through a rich selection of images, this artist’s book, published in two editions—gold and silver—explores the birth, life and death of Francesco Gennari’s work Vorrei perdermi e non trovarmi più, 2022, exhibited for the first time at the Ciaccia Levi Gallery in Paris.
Through a rich selection of images, this artist’s book, published in two editions—gold and silver—explores the birth, life and death of Francesco Gennari’s work Vorrei perdermi e non trovarmi più, 2022, exhibited for the first time at the Ciaccia Levi Gallery in Paris.
This richly illustrated publication combines artwork, archival and process imagery, and includes an extended interview with the artist, as well as new essays by key thinkers in the fields of anthropology, philosophy, political economy and art history.
In the first monograph on the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine, political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari explores the artist’s theoretical and political innovations to illuminate a more haptic, embodied approach to the practice of critical theory.
Shahryar Nashat inserts his art in the pages of this new artist’s book, which takes the form of a catalogue-turned-manual: but instead of explaining its meaning, he strips it of its aura, flaunts its nature as an object and describes step-by-step how to create it.
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