Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
Since the 1980s, Belgian artist Sigefride Bruna Hauman has created a highly original body of work in different media. Her installations, reliefs and videos are the subject of a much-overdue retrospective organized by M Leuven—and of this first monograph.
Rituals of Care is an extensive monograph devoted to the work of Antonio Obá, published in conjunction with his eponymous exhibition presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, curated by Andrea Bellini. Extensively illustrated, the book immerses the reader in Obá’s multifaceted oeuvre and in the magical iconographic universe of his paintings.
Claiming that the museum is not enough means asking what a museum should be and do, eventually questioning the role of cultural institutions in society. Through conversations, stills of documentaries, responses, and reprints of archival documents that explore ideas of architecture on the ground, this volume reflects on the tools deployed by the institution to redefine its relationship to others.
Affirmer que le musée ne suffit pas, c’est interroger ce qu’un musée devrait être et faire, et réfléchir de manière critique sur le rôle des institutions culturelles dans nos sociétés. À travers des conversations, des photogrammes de documentaires, des interventions et des reproductions d’archives questionnant les conceptions de l’architecture sur le terrain, ce volume réfléchit aux outils mis en œuvre par l’institution pour redéfinir sa relation aux autres.
Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins is the first monograph on the work of the Palestinian artist and filmmaker Basma al-Sharif. Spanning nearly two decades of moving-image and installation work, it combines visual documentation with texts that reflect on the charged political landscapes through which al-Sharif navigates.
This monograph marks the occasion of the first European survey of Nicola L. (1932–2018). Often discussed in the context of Pop Art, activism, feminism, and design, this is the first in-depth exploration of the multi-layered and expansive nature of her extraordinary practice, which also encompassed cosmology, environmental concerns, spirituality, political protest, and sexuality.
Texts by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Laura McLean-Ferris, Cally Spooner
Designed by Pacific
Co-published with Swiss Institute, New York
2024, English, hardcover, 20 x 28 cm, 164 pages
ISBN 979-12-80759-59-1
Exhibiting performances that unfold across media—on film, in texts, as objects, though sounds, and as illustrated in drawings—Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. With artworks that feature olive oil soap, WhatsApp messages, the voice of a business, the sound of a head cold, eroding support structures, a child development theorist, a poisoning, and an oversize graph, Spooner’s work crystallizes an absurd contemporary ecosystem in which entities run the risk of managing themselves and one another to death.
SWEAT SHAME ETC. surveys Spooner’s artistic output of the last five years and include a lecture by Spooner along newly commissioned essays by Laura McLean Ferris, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A 2018 series of drawings on paper, from which the monograph takes its name, features hastily sketched figures that take care of their bodies while shedding clothes, socks, limbs, and torsos. Though their heads are scratched out, they remain unexpectedly determined and unperturbed.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi