Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
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.
This book, with follows the eponymous exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, is constructed as a story, with a prologue, four acts, and an epilogue: an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative.
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. It features a 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?
What if clay is the future and the future is clay? Curators Chus Martínez and Filipa Ramos brought together a group of artists to think and create through this old, maleable and fascinating matter. The result was materialized in an exhibition and book format entitled Feet of Clay.
Edited by Giovanna Borasi, Albert Ferré, Francesco Garutti, Jayne Kelley
Texts by Sandrine Colard, Corinna Gardner, Oulimata Gueye, Claudio Gulli, Siliva Gutiérrez, Renato Leotta, Andrea Lissoni, Hannah Turner, Akram Zaatari
Designed by (Studio) Jonathan Hares / Amaury Hamon
Published with Canadian Centre for Architecture
2025, English, softcover, 224 pages, 24 x 31 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-72-0
The CCA conceives The Museum Is Not Enough as a platform to reflect on some of the beliefs and concerns that define its curatorial activity—why and how it works—and, by extension, the role of cultural institutions in society. Stating that the museum is not enough means asking what a museum should be and do, and suggests that its entitlement to concentrate knowledge and meaning has dissolved.
As a follow-up of a first volume published in 2019 that built on years of thematic investigations, the book focuses on how the institution works out and on these questions by rethinking its tools and how it relates to others. The Museum Is Not Enough (no. 10–14) gathers conversations among curators, artists, academics, and architects on how institutions engage multiple contexts, objects, and perspectives: reflecting on strategies to unlearn and decentre established ways of seeing and doing; looking closely at how to describe and document archival sources while interrogating the stakes, and often the harm, in separating cultural objects from their context; questioning the relationship between institutions and “the public”; and discussing curatorial tools—and particularly film—that collapse research and display, observation and action, here and there.
Underlying these reflections is the realization that the museum’s activity can’t be constructed from a fixed position. Unless the questions it deals with are observed from another angle, it is hard not to perpetuate the thinking that created them. The book responds to an urgent need to equip the institution to understand how things around it are rapidly changing, and the importance of conveying and discussing this instability. Here, the museum gets outside its physical walls to explore on-site, to talk with people, to connect and activate collaborators, to design conditions for different forms of dialogue to happen on the ground.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi