Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
This artist’s first monograph brings together sketches, documentation and installation shots, as well as an in-depth analysis of her practice. It highlights her process of making art, from the conception of an idea to the finished work, and from the deconstruction and re-assembling of her characters’ identities to the relentless creation of new worlds.
Published on the occasion of the first exhibition in Italy by Jenna Gribbon, staged at the Collezione Maramotti, Mirages showcases a wealth of images that highlight the fluid, sensual output of this artist who, in repeatedly portraying her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott (aka TORRES), explores the implications inherent in seeing and being seen.
The catalogue of this ambitious project, held at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2017, reflects on the centrality of writing in contemporary visual art practices. Documenting its slippages from printed matters to the digital realm, from voice modulations to its sculptural presence, this book celebrates the word in all its forms.
A book emerged from the need to try to tell the story of architecture in a way quite unlike how it’s usually told, in a continuous dialogue between the anthropological gaze of Armin Linke’s photos compared with the ideation process of two public works by the Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli architecture office.
The book documents and brings together two exhibition projects by Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.
Can art, literature, filmmaking, and music draw out, make visible, legible, audible, or even contestable the patterns in which our lives are held? Considering the work by Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ingri Fiksdal, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, and Elizabeth Price, this publication entertains this question.
Edited by Samuele Piazza
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston
Design by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2022, English / Italian, softcover, 224 pages, 16.5 x 24 cm
ISBN: 979-12-80579-14-0
Hardscapes / HERE documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell (Växjö, 1979) and Maria Hassabi (Cyprus, 1973). Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.
Hassabi’s live installation HERE calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the “here and now.” Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.
Canell’s Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from “dragon gates”—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.
In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.
