Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
A Cosmic Movie Camera is the title of the 18th edition of the BIM’24, which also marks the 50th anniversary of the Biennale organized by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. By blending the real and the virtual, its catalogue captures the spirit of the exhibition, which explores the evolution of moving images, particularly in our algorithmic age.
The book seeks to define the contours of the obsession with the teenage years; a fixation that has shaped a significant strand of contemporary art over the last ten years. Adolescence is here understood as a state of mind, a prolonged condition that dissolves the transition into adulthood and becomes a critique of an unstable world.
In this multi-voiced book, starting from the Orobie Alpine range, the mountainside becomes an epistemological lens through which to interpret contemporaneity and address issues such as multi-species migrations, our relationship with geological time and intergenerational inheritance, and the rethinking of collective memories and rituals.
For years now, the Die Vier von der Tankstelle (Four from the Gas Station) have been roaming across an area stretching out to the south of the Baltic Sea. They prowl their way through sparsely populated areas, wantonly terrorizing the inhabitants. The 2026 calendar by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys bears witness to their presence.
The first monograph dedicated to Lorenza Longhi, published with the Kunst Museum Winterthur, adopts a format associated with prototypes, manuals, or working documents. Its irregularities reflect Longhi’s ongoing examination of value, functionality, and the aesthetics of the everyday.
This publication is an extensive monograph devoted to the work of Carlos Bunga, published in conjunction with his eponymous show at CAM – Gulbenkian. In addition to a number of essays, which offer an in-depth look at his multifaceted practice, the book contains previously unpublished photos that reveal his working process.
Edited by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti and Beatrice Gibson
Texts by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Alice Notley
Design by HIT
2023, English / Italian, softcover, 21 x 13 cm, 56 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-43-0
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. Dreaming Alcestis was co-directed and co-scripted by Gibson, her partner Nicholas Gordon and critic Maria Nadotti. The publication features a specially 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?
Drawing on the protagonist of Euripides’s ancient myth as its ancestral guide, Dreaming Alcestis offers a poetic reflection on living and dying at a time of acute social, political and economic turmoil, documenting—via dream life—Gibson and Gordon’s relocation from Northern to Southern Europe. In the film, two characters, dreaming of a long-dead queen, are filmed in long takes, refracted holographically and interrupted only by the sounds of the city and the sea. In Gibson’s words, “2,500 years after her birth, Alcestis—in the film, a mysterious, Lynchian figure—returns from the underworld, dreaming of, or possibly dreamed by, a man and woman who have traversed Europe in search of her, from North to South, with family in tow. Meanwhile, the ice caps melt, 43 wars rage around the globe and another city burns on TV.” In a feminist key, Gibson, Gordon and Nadotti reclaim a minor heroine from Greek mythology, using her as a therapeutic device to reflect on what it is to be human in the contemporary context.
Premiering at the British Art show in 2022, Dreaming Alcestis was exhibited on the occasion of the artist’s first solo show in Italy, Dream Gossip, at Ordet in Milan, and was subsequently taken on tour, first to the Museo Civico di Castelbuono and then to Macro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The book and the film Dreaming Alcestis are part of Alkestis, a project orchestrated by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono in partnership with the British Art Show 9 (Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London), and made possible thanks to the support of the Italian Council (10th Edition, 2021), a program run by the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity.
Photos: Studio Chair