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 Michelle Cotton and Francesco Manacorda
Texts by Guglielmo Castelli, Sarah Crowe, Lillian Davies, and Francesco Manacorda
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2026, English / Italian / German, 24 x 30 cm, 256 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-90-4
Published on the occasion of the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Guglielmo Castelli: Sweet Baby Motel is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s painting and sculpture. The publication conducts a wide-ranging investigation into the artist’s ethereal poetics, including newly commissioned essays by the curators of the exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Kunsthalle Wien, and by art historian and critic Lillian Davies. Davies explores the enigmatic depths of Castelli’s painting practice, and curator Sarah Crowe pays particular attention to the artist’s weightless, boneless, and genderless figures. Francesco Manacorda interviews the artist on his scenographic, filmic approach.
Castelli developed a new corpus of works for the exhibitions in Turin and Vienna that spans painting, collage, and sculpture, and culminates in a selection of his sketchbooks. Facilitating a deep understanding of process and intimate aspects of Castelli’s practice, these sketchbooks are invaluable repositories of creative trajectories, containing references from different places and times, which are then carefully selected by the artist to flow into his work.
The sketchbooks and the artistic process they embody guide the temporal structure and artistic intimacy of the publication. Castelli constellates myriad materials—from preliminary drawings and notes to poetry excerpts and fabric cutoffs—as conceptual inspiration for bodies of work that he conceives as fully fledged exhibitions. In the publication, examples of these collaged fields of associations preface documentation of individual exhibitions and their groups of work, thus bringing the artist’s practice full circle.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi