Edizioni Conz

Edizioni Conz, comprising more than 550 editions of objects, portfolio works, paintings, and works on various materials, was published between 1972 and 2008 and are among the finest products of Italian publishing art. Many of the editions published by Francesco Conz have long been out of print; only those editions that are still for sale are listed here. The catalogue raisonné of Edizioni Conz will be published by Hatje Cantz in July, 2023.

Francesco Conz (1935-2010) combined in a special, perhaps even unique way, the activities of collecting and publishing with that of photographing. For him, this triumvirate was integrated into one activity, it was his vita activa, without one of the individual activities predominating, although his approximately 200,000 photographs reveal a thoroughly obsessive tendency to take photographs. The significance of this triumvirate lay in the plexus, the interconnectedness of his life in action and understanding. Francesco Conz did not create Fluxus, nor Concrete Poetry, Lettrism, Viennese Actionism, or any avant-garde or neo-avant-garde. He was not interested in “movements”; instead, he wove himself into the fabric of a post-war art that aimed more strongly at the human, social, and political conditions of life in Europe, America, and Asia than at an aesthetic tradition, the art market that only slowly emerged in the 1980s, or the museum. Archivio Conz is defined by Francesco Conz’s rare gift for bringing people together, for posing here as a servant, there as a scion of the Medici.

“...Maybe the thing that impressed me most during that first visit to Conz was his firm belief in artists he was working with. ‘Over the last couple of years, I have made hundreds of these,’ he told me. ‘My cellars are chock-a-block. Right now, nobody is interested in these, but that will change over time.’ He banged a catalogue with his hand and lifted it. ‘These artists will really make it’ , he said, ‘they are the Picasso's of the future!’ Regularly he invited artists to Verona to work on new editions for a while. They had their apartment, and everything was done to make them feel as comfortable as possible. If somebody wanted to produce a fifty-meter-long silkscreen, then Conz found a place that could handle the job: in the end, the silkscreen would be made.”

– Harry Ruhé

“Since a lot of the work is performance and therefore ephemeral, his collecting has been the gathering together of the relics, artifacts and fetishes from both our work and our lives, and documenting all of this with photographs, many photographs. He has made editions of this photographic material as one way of sharing some of our history. But then more recently he has presented us with the possibility of working with silkscreen on fabric. What images can make sense in a large format? What happens when an image changes size?”

– Geoffrey Hendricks