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 Adriana Varejão, Helena de Freitas, and Victor Gorgulho
Authors: Elena Crippa, Raphael Fonseca, Helena de Freitas, Victor Gorgulho and Adriana Varejão
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2025, English, softcover, 24 x 32 cm, 152 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-58-4
Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão. Between Your Teeth, published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition held at CAM – Gulbenkian in Lisbon, explores convergences in the work of Paula Rego (Lisbon, 1935 – London, 2022) and Adriana Varejão (Rio de Janeiro, 1964), although they belong to different generations and come from different backgrounds.
Curated by Adriana Varejão, Helena de Freitas, and Victor Gorgulho, the exhibition, which presents nearly 80 works—including paintings, engravings, sculptures, and installations—is divided into thirteen thematic rooms. The long conversation between the three curators, which forms the main text of the catalogue, reflects the structure of the exhibition, addressing the different thematic nodes and revealing the conceptual and methodological process that guided the selection of works.
The two essays by Raphael Fonseca and Elena Crippa, which complete the catalogue, offer further insights, by highlighting several similarities in the practice of the two artists from a critical perspective.
The title—Between Your Teeth—is a line taken from the 1974 Poemas aos homens do nosso tempo (Poems to the men of our time) by the Brazilian poet and novelist, Hilda Hilst, in a clear allusion to the dictatorial regime that had begun in Brazil in the previous decade. Hilst describes and criticises the power associated to greed, conquest, profit and exploitation. In their representations of literal and metaphorical bodies, Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão reflect on how patriarchy, colonialism and all forms of oppression mutually interact, “chewing up” people and their stories.
This is the artists’ first joint exhibition in Portugal, having already exhibited together in Rio de Janeiro (Carpintaria, 2017), when Paula Rego was still alive.
The catalogue fosters the encounter between Adriana Varejão, who has developed pioneering work in the field of postcolonial thought, and the work of Paula Rego, whose political force is developed by a productive tension between a private register and its public dimension, expanding the interpretive universe of the two artists.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi