Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
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.
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.
Edited by Andrea Bellini
Texts by Andrea Bellini, Mathieu Copeland, Carla Demierre, Brian Droitcour, Karl Holmqvist, Kenneth Goldsmith and Quinn Latimer
Design by Robert Huber
2022, English, softcover, 178 pages, 16.9 x 22.4 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-23-2
Five years after the exhibition From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word, and after a disastrous pandemic, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève presents the catalogue for this complex, ambitious project. Even at such a remove, we thought it was important to retrace the fundamental stages of this event through critical essays, images of the works and installations, and the calendar of performances and poetry readings. The reason is simple: despite the undeniable weight of images in today’s world, a keen interest in writing — rather surprisingly — has recently become a hallmark of many young artists’ work. They use writing as a tool to understand the world and as the cornerstone of a critical method, analyzing the present and creating a performative, politically engaged language.
From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word explored the emancipation of language through historical and contemporary positions, from the earliest typographic and sound works of concrete poets to poetic experiments in the digital era. This diverse exhibition was accompanied by a series of readings, performances, and screenings revealing the porosity between art and poetry. Poetry readings and recitals in museums, performances centered on the importance of the text and its recitation, videos where poetic language takes on a role that rivals the visual component: the art of our time appears to be deeply and intimately rooted in words.
The program of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, while tracing this link between word and image to the concrete poetry of the 1960s and ’70s, tried on the one hand to examine this renewed artistic interest in the word, and on the other to show how the web and social media are introducing new ways of making poetry. The underlying aim was to explore how art and poetry shape each other in an increasingly interconnected world through ongoing, rhapsodic communication.
