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 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