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 Michelle Cotton and Francesco Manacorda
Texts by Guglielmo Castelli, Sarah Crowe, Lillian Davies, and Francesco Manacorda
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2026, English / Italian / German, 24 x 30 cm, 256 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-90-4
Published on the occasion of the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Guglielmo Castelli: Sweet Baby Motel is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s painting and sculpture. The publication conducts a wide-ranging investigation into the artist’s ethereal poetics, including newly commissioned essays by the curators of the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Kunsthalle Wien, and by art historian and critic Lillian Davies. Davies explores the enigmatic depths of Castelli’s painting practice, and curator Sarah Crowe pays particular attention to the artist’s weightless, boneless, and genderless figures. Francesco Manacorda interviews the artist on his scenographic, filmic approach.
Castelli developed a new corpus of works for the exhibitions in Turin and Vienna that spans painting, collage, and sculpture, and culminates in a selection of his sketchbooks. Facilitating a deep understanding of process and intimate aspects of Castelli’s practice, these sketchbooks are invaluable repositories of creative trajectories, containing references from different places and times, which are then carefully selected by the artist to flow into his work.
The sketchbooks and the artistic process they embody guide the temporal structure and artistic intimacy of the publication. Castelli constellates myriad materials—from preliminary drawings and notes to poetry excerpts and fabric cutoffs—as conceptual inspiration for bodies of work that he conceives as fully fledged exhibitions. In the publication, examples of these collaged fields of associations preface documentation of individual exhibitions and their groups of work, thus bringing the artist’s practice full circle.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi