Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
This new major monographic publication on the Ghanian artist documents the work that transformed sites and repurposed buildings in his native town of Tamale to transformative outcomes rooted into the idea of art as a tool of understanding, rebalancing, and advancement.
For life and limbs, Austrian artist and curator Anna-Sophie Berger has assembled a group of works, from Arakawa and Gins to Lyle Ashton Harris, that register the body as a habitat that can be imaginatively stretched, altered, modified, adorned, replicated or destroyed.
This two-volume catalog, curated by Andrea Bellini and the New York-based collective DIS, is the outcome of the 2021 edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (BIM’21), presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.
Christian Frosi was long considered one of the most inspiring and promising Italian artists debuting in the early 2000s. That is until just over ten years into his career, when he decided to make himself unreachable and remove himself from art history, its customs and figures.
Featuring new contributions by Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi and a wealth of commissioned texts and writings, this book is conceived as a continuation of the exhibition held at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich and, in a modified form, at Swiss Institute, New York.
In a context in which institutions are facing a surge of public scrutiny, the publication revisits the artistic practice of institutional critique to ask what it means today, and to consider its ability to respond to the urgent social, political, and economic issues of our time.
Edited by Eva Fabbris with Giovanna Manzotti
Texts by Eva Fabbris, Alexis Vaillant and a conversation between Alessandro Pessoli and Pierpaolo Campanini. Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2021, English / Italian, softcover. 24 x 33.5 cm, 88 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-06-5
“In general, my whole work is a movement from the inside to the outside and vice versa; past and present, personal and collective are fluctuating entities; the work becomes an intermediate place where a transformation of the tragic sense of the world, of its conflict and violence, is taking place.” (Alessandro Pessoli, from a conversation with Pierpaolo Campanini)
Alessandro Pessoli (Cervia, Italy, 1963) lives and works in Los Angeles. His practice is typically multimedia in nature, focusing on drawing, painting and sculpture, while also favoring ceramic. Often underscored by themes spanning politics, religion, history, culture, and identity, his research recalls the theme of the sacred and the religious, emerging both from the resumption of historical figures, classical art-historical iconography, and everyday images which intermingle in a reconstruction of reality that is dreamlike, painful, and sometimes grotesque, but never lacking instinctive emotion.
The publication Testa Cristiana is the outcome of the project of the same name specifically conceived by the artist for the spaces of the Cloisters of Sant’Eustorgio and the Carlo Maria Martini Diocesan Museum in Milan, where all these issues are traceable in existing works and new productions created for the exhibition. Offering an intimate path that conveys Pessoli’s idea of sacredness, the show is a site-specific dialogue with the architecture and the relics preserved in the building, reflecting his conception of the sacred as confronted with contemporary life, which demands us to coexist with pain and uncertainty.
The volume aims to articulate this approach through a rich selection of installation views and a dedicated section where the exhibited works are graphically treated as “icons.” It features a text by writer and curator Alexis Vaillant on Pessoli’s oeuvre, with a particular focus on his chimeric figurative vocabulary, and an essay by curator Eva Fabbris, investigating the sense of the sacred through the artist’s practice. In addition, a conversation between Alessandro Pessoli and the Italian artist Pierpaolo Campanini reflects on the possible degree of spirituality in their artistic research.
Ph: Lorenzo Mason Studio
Eva Fabbris is Exhibition Curator at Fondazione Prada, and also active as an independent curator and art historian. She has curated exhibitions at Fondazione Pomodoro in Milan, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Triennale di Milano, Fondazione Morra in Naples. As a writer, she is a contributor for international exhibition catalogs, publications, and magazines.