Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
This richly illustrated publication combines artwork, archival and process imagery, and includes an extended interview with the artist, as well as new essays by key thinkers in the fields of anthropology, philosophy, political economy and art history.
In the first monograph on the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine, political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari explores the artist’s theoretical and political innovations to illuminate a more haptic, embodied approach to the practice of critical theory.
Shahryar Nashat inserts his art in the pages of this new artist’s book, which takes the form of a catalogue-turned-manual: but instead of explaining its meaning, he strips it of its aura, flaunts its nature as an object and describes step-by-step how to create it.
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.
Edited by Edoardo Bonaspetti
Commissioning Editors: Maria Sica (director, IIC Tel Aviv) and Nicola Trezzi (director and curator,
CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo)
Design Lorenzo Mason Studio
2023, English, softcover, 21 x 30 cm, twenty 60 × 40 cm sheets of wrapping paper
ISBN: 979-12-80579-26-3
On March 11, 2011, the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan created a tsunami that laid waste to the country’s east coast, causing a catastrophic breach at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Since then, access to the contaminated towns and surrounding countryside has been mostly limited to scientists and specialized decontamination crews. The project Don’t Follow the Wind (2015–ongoing)—organized by the Tokyo-based art collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group, together with Kenji Kubota, Jason Waite, and Eva & Franco Mattes—marked a historic exception: a group of artists entered the exclusion zone to produce a series of site-specific works. Installed in several venues on loan from former residents, these interventions comprise an exhibition that will remain unreachable in person for many years to come, until it will finally be deemed safe to return.
Fukushima Texture Pack is an artistic record of Eva & Franco Mattes’ engagement with this contaminated landscape. Borrowing the format of books of wrapping paper, it contains twenty large pre-perforated sheets. Each features a visual texture, a surface captured on camera amid radioactive ruins. All such patterns afford a seamless repeating motif, should they be installed in a tile formation as wallpaper. They comprise a representative sample of the 152 textures the artists first released online as freehold digital files. The pages of this book may be used freely to cover other books, decorate boxes, wrap gifts, form origami, or they may be framed as small works of art.
This artist’s book extends Eva & Franco Mattes’ interest in Fukushima’s geographical displacement. Following its radioactive ungrounding, this location is now most accessible through its representation. But images are given to obscuring the matter at hand—to wrapping it up, so to speak, in a reduced form. The tragic proportions of the Fukushima meltdown outstrip virtually all frames. With this in mind, how can one maintain awareness of this nuclear disaster? How might we live with the facts?
The textures—sampling walls and floors, rust, bricks, gravel, underbrush, tatami mats, dirt, desks, closets, and more—are unspectacular by design. Eschewing the gnarled automobiles, collapsed buildings, and other wrecks left in the wake of the tsunami, the visual banality of these posters speak to an invisible crisis. Additionally, their modular, tessellating design allows for the limitless spread of a given motif. As possible wallpaper, they evoke the new baselines of background radiation, omnipresent in and around the exclusion zone—a new surface condition.
The publication is supported by Istituto Italiano di Cultura Tel Aviv in collaboration with CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo.
