Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
The first major monograph on artist Jill Mulleady, whose paintings thread motifs of decay, memory, history, and private myth, featuring humans and animals enacting their instinctive psychological reactions to ever-present threats of danger.
The essays in this first-ever monograph dedicated to Swiss artist Jan Vorisek, alongside image portfolios of the exhibitions they explore and an appendix that features photos and documentation of Vorisek’s performances, recordings and ephemera, grant us unprecedented access to the private fictions that the work reveals.
Since the 1990s Costa has been challenging hierarchies of art production and the fetishization of the “finished” artwork, inviting viewers to reconsider what is discarded, both materially and socially. Through over 300 artworks, accompanied by new writing, this catalogue explores Adriano Costa’s work, a meditation on transformation—of objects, meanings, and systems of value.
This richly illustrated book considers the dazzling oeuvre of choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas. In line with her creative methodology, Alexandra Balona unfolds an “atlas of affects” through five emblematic dance pieces that reveal the intensity, humor, and humanity of one of today’s most radical choreographic voices.
Invited to present an exhibition at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu has developed an innovative approach to museum space, challenging hierarchy, permanence, and fixed meanings. With in-depth essays and a rich selection of illustrations, this catalog retraces that exhibition and explores the themes and concerns that have long characterized the artist’s practice.
Invitata a concepire una mostra alla Galleria Borghese, l’artista keniota-americana Wangechi Mutu ha sviluppato un approccio innovativo allo spazio museale, confrontandosi con le gerarchie, la permanenze e le sedimentazioni del contesto. Attraverso saggi approfonditi e una ricca selezione di illustrazioni, questo catalogo ripercorre la mostra ed esplora i temi e le preoccupazioni che da tempo caratterizzano la pratica dell’artista.
Edited by Ibrahim Mahama and Eva Brioschi
Texts by Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Ibrahim Mahama; Eva Brioschi; karî’kachä seid’ou and Selom Kudjie
Design: Studio Temp
Softcover, 272 pages, 21 x 28.5 cm
English / Italian
ISBN 979-12-80579-20-1
Ibrahim Mahama was born in 1987 in Tamale, a city in northern Ghana where he lives and works. He studied painting and sculpture at Kwame Nkurumah University in Kumasi, Ghana, earning a master’s degree in painting and sculpture in 2013. During his university years, he began working on installations reflecting on the theme of globalization, labor, and the movement of goods, with works made in collaboration with local communities. In 2019, Mahama opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), a foundation run by a group of artists and curators active in Ghana, which was followed by the establishment of Redclay in the suburbs of Tamale. This large facility incorporates artist studios (including his own), research spaces, an artist residency, a permanent collection of artworks, workshop rooms (some set up inside old decommissioned airplanes), and large plots of land dedicated to various types of cultivation. All of this contributes to this visionary artist’s desire to take an active part in the economic, social, and cultural development of his country, providing powerful incentives and teachings to new generations, to make the local population as participatory and economically self-sufficient as possible.
This volume, published to accompany Mahama’s inaugural exhibition at Eataly Art House, in Verona, is constructed as visual diary of artist’s impressive work in his native Tamale, a community-based project founded on the understanding of art as totalizing, reparatory experience: a catalyzer of energies directed for change and social progress. It features texts by the curator Eva Brioschi, Mahama’s professor and mentor karî’kachä seid’ou with Selom Kudjie, and Mahama himself with Bernard Akoi-Jackson.
Voli-ni, which literally means “inside the hole,” is composed of individual particles with their own meaning: Vo, “to pull out,” “extract”; li, “to transfer,” “teleport”; and ni, “here and now.”
Voli-ni therefore indicates an emersion from darkness, from a failed past of defeat, towards the possibility of redemption, regeneration, through a portal that is real (recovered architecture) or imaginary (art).
