Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
Over the last ten years, Raphael Hefti has created an astonishingly body of work consisting of sculptures and installations, performance and “art-in-public-spaces.” The first comprehensive monograph is published on the occasion of his major exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel.
Between 1998 and 1999, the London-based art collective BANK operated the Fax-Bak Service. The group’s members proof-read and copy-edited more than 300 press releases by galleries. The publication is the most comprehensive record of this notorious project.
In the Villa Santo Sospir, Jean Cocteau conceived his pictorial work through accumulation, inspired by Greek mythology and the Mediterranean landscape. Architecture permeates the subjects of Mauro Restiffe from a viewpoint that amplifies and reverberates the simple historical record.
Oh mio cagnetto, is the artist’s first book of writings, conceived as an artwork. It is a collection of 81 little poems that revolve around the missed and mourned figure of a puppy. It intentionally plays on the ambiguity of its nature, as both a book distributed in conventional ways and an art object.
When she started writing the Corona Tales, Chus Martínez had been weighing how people and the media were addressing the outbreak of the virus as an unprecedented disaster. One possible contribution, as curator and writer, would be to write a short story a day…
Edited by Eva Fabbris with Giovanna Manzotti
Texts by Eva Fabbris, Alexis Vaillant and a conversation between Alessandro Pessoli and Pierpaolo Campanini. Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2021, English / Italian, softcover. 24 x 33.5 cm, 88 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-06-5
“In general, my whole work is a movement from the inside to the outside and vice versa; past and present, personal and collective are fluctuating entities; the work becomes an intermediate place where a transformation of the tragic sense of the world, of its conflict and violence, is taking place.” (Alessandro Pessoli, from a conversation with Pierpaolo Campanini)
Alessandro Pessoli (Cervia, Italy, 1963) lives and works in Los Angeles. His practice is typically multimedia in nature, focusing on drawing, painting and sculpture, while also favoring ceramic. Often underscored by themes spanning politics, religion, history, culture, and identity, his research recalls the theme of the sacred and the religious, emerging both from the resumption of historical figures, classical art-historical iconography, and everyday images which intermingle in a reconstruction of reality that is dreamlike, painful, and sometimes grotesque, but never lacking instinctive emotion.
The publication Testa Cristiana is the outcome of the project of the same name specifically conceived by the artist for the spaces of the Cloisters of Sant’Eustorgio and the Carlo Maria Martini Diocesan Museum in Milan, where all these issues are traceable in existing works and new productions created for the exhibition. Offering an intimate path that conveys Pessoli’s idea of sacredness, the show is a site-specific dialogue with the architecture and the relics preserved in the building, reflecting his conception of the sacred as confronted with contemporary life, which demands us to coexist with pain and uncertainty.
The volume aims to articulate this approach through a rich selection of installation views and a dedicated section where the exhibited works are graphically treated as “icons.” It features a text by writer and curator Alexis Vaillant on Pessoli’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on his chimeric figurative vocabulary, and an essay by curator Eva Fabbris, investigating the sense of the sacred through the artist’s practice. In addition, a conversation between Alessandro Pessoli and the Italian artist Pierpaolo Campanini reflects on the possible degree of spirituality in their artistic research.
Ph: Lorenzo Mason Studio
Eva Fabbris is Exhibition Curator at Fondazione Prada, and also active as an independent curator and art historian. She has curated exhibitions at Fondazione Pomodoro in Milan, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Triennale di Milano, Fondazione Morra in Naples. As a writer, she is a contributor for international exhibition catalogs, publications, and magazines.