Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
The paintings and drawings by Jake Grewal draw the viewer in through stillness and ambiguity: they invite reflection on how we inhabit places—physically and emotionally—and how our inner landscapes mirror the physical world. This is the Grewal’s first book, published to accompany the artist’s exhibition at Studio Voltaire.
The transformation of the notion of monuments and the way cultural institutions choose to deal with it find in Maurizio Cattelan an interpreter capable of manipulating historical memory and shared symbols, to the point of turning them into a terrain of doubt and play. Lisa Parola and Lorenzo Giusti investigate the potential of contemporary art within the public sphere.
This is a visual archive of 12 years of developing, designing and exhibiting the House of One, a multireligious sacred space in the heart of Berlin. The architecture, conceived by Kuehn Malvezzi, has been displayed at various venues while being developed in close collaboration with three local religious communities in Berlin since 2012.
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.
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