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 Clarisse Fahrtmann, Clementine Proby and Joel Valabrega
Foreword by Bettina Steinbrügge
Authors: Kate Cooper, Lukas Hofmann, David McDermott, Markus Pilgram, Agnieszka Polska, Clémentine Proby, Sin Wai Kin, Bettina Steinbrügge, Geraldine Tedder, Joel Valabrega and Lauren Wetmore
Design by Sam de Groot
2023, English, softcover, 16.5 x 24 cm, 200 pages
ISBN: 979-12-80579-52-2
After Laughter Comes Tears, in its exhibition and book forms, brings together artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative. This publication follows the structure of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, with a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, which each sample excerpts from the range of theory, fiction and poetry that inspired and substantiate the themes of the exhibition. Widening the spectrum of the traditional catalogue, each artist was given a “carte blanche”—an invitation to contribute to the book on their own terms.
This performative book was conceived as a story; a story of the pains, joys, anxieties and doubts of the 2020s. It takes as a starting point, the feelings of stasis and anger that define the present stage of late capitalism, framed by the anxieties of a generation facing a climate crisis, welfare states trampled and failed by neoliberal policies and the rise of xenophobia around the globe, partly fueled by fake news spreading on- and offline. It is an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists expressing the lurid shapes of the crises that surround us and form a (never exhaustive) part of our contemporary reality. They are Cem A., Panteha Abareshi, Monira Al Qadiri, Kate Cooper, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Jesse Darling, Stine Deja, Omer Fast, Anna Franceschini, Guan Xiao, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lukáš Hofmann, Christian Jankowski, Chris Korda, Ndayé Kouagou, Ghislaine Leung, Isaac Lythgoe, Taus Makhacheva, Diego Marcon, Jacopo Miliani, Marie Munk, Chalisée Naamani, Agnieszka Polska, PRICE, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Mika Rottenberg, Julika Rudelius, Dorian Sari, Sin Wai Kin, Shinuk Suh, Martine Syms, Mungo Thomson, Cajsa von Zeipel, and Artur Żmijewski.
Photos: Fabrizio Vatieri