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 Lorenzo Giusti and Valentina Gervasoni
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti and Lisa Parola
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2025, English / Italian, softcover, 11 x 17.7 cm, 96 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-96-6
On the occasion of Seasons, Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibition at GAMeC, art historian Lisa Parola, investigates how contemporary art can redefine the idea of the monument: no longer an immobile place of celebration, but a critical space of removal and transformation, promoting new relationships with both history and the present. Parola reflects on the changing concept of the monument and how cultural institutions choose to deal with layered and sometimes contradictory symbols. Lorenzo Giusti, curator of the exhibition, accompanies the essay with an insight on the works presented in order to show how, in Cattelan’s work, symbols stratify, shift, and contradict each other. How the imperial eagle becomes a vulnerable body; how the nineteenth-century statue dedicated to Garibaldi is turned into a pedestal for something else. Who? A grandson on his grandfather’s shoulders? A new Garibaldian? Or a little vandal mocking ancient values? By so doing, he notes how between history and nature, cracks, fractures, and new possibilities may be opened up.
You Don’t Make a Masterpiece, You Survive One is the fourth book in a series of short essay collections inspired by the site-specific art projects specially conceived for GAMeC at Palazzo della Ragione: a symbolic, time-honored location in the city of Bergamo that embodies all the values of community life and participation. The artists were asked to name an author who interests them—be it a researcher, a philosopher or a scholar—and whose thinking could be said to underpin their project, with a view to finding a path through the complexities of the present day, starting from the work produced but without necessarily lingering on it.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi