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 Tolia Astakhishvili and Hans Ulrich Obrist
Texts: Tolia Astakhishvili, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2025, English, softcover, 160 pages, 24 x 34 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-65-2
The artist’s book to love and devour by Tolia Astakhishvili was published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at the new site of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in Venice, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
The book, produced in close collaboration with the Lorenzo Mason Studio, brings together drawings, paintings, and archive images composed directly amid the cracks, wounds, and skin of a building located in the historic center of Venice, which served as the artist’s studio for a number of months. Through processes of transformation of the space, addition and subtraction, expansion and contraction, Astakhishvili has created a project shot through with a deep sense of disruption, distortion and fragmentation—a feeling of uncertainty that is reflected in the way in which visitors to the installation are given the freedom to move around, without having to concentrate on a center or to follow a pre-set route. Appropriately, then, the book takes the form of a stream of images, in which the spaces and materials of the building (wood, glass, dust, mold, bricks, concrete, plaster …) enter into a dialog with the drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages, and photographs made by the artist herself and the other invited artists, including Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Rafik Greiss, Dylan Peirce, James Richards, and Maka Sanadze.
For Tolia Astakhishvili, architecture is the space of projection of ideas, which are developed in that space, generating actions that are separate but conducted simultaneously: alteration of structural elements, pictorial and graphic composition, and creation of perceptive ambiguities—of space, light, and sound. The book compiles the traces of this practice, serving as a sort of diachronic diary in the form of images, constituting a complete encapsulation of the artist’s poetics.
The book also features a new interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Photos: Giacomo Bianco