source: white-flag-projectsorg

Lena Henke has held solo exhibitions with Real Fine Arts, New York; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt am Main; Kunstverein Oldenburg, Oldenburg; and 1857, Oslo. She has participated in group exhibitions held with Greene Naftali, New York; Pro Choice, Vienna; and the Glasgow International, Glasgow. Together with artist Marie Karlberg, Henke co-founded the itinerant curatorial project M/L Artspace, which has mounted exhibitions in such locations as a nail salon and a parking lot under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Henke completed her MFA dually at at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main and the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow. She lives and works in New York.
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source: frieze-magazinde

Henke is no purist, juxtaposing iconography that is self-consciously ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’. Her sculptures seem to gleefully riff on and undermine textbook art historical categories, a fact perhaps most clear in her show She aid Something Like Don’t Let Me Walk the Stairs Again I Said But You Live There, featuring a row of eight translucent plastic rectangular prisms, printed with hazy, primeval-looking figures and mounted at urinal-divider height along the wall of Brooklyn’s Real Fine Arts in 2012. The figures – seemingly dancing in a circle as if on a classical Greek urn – were actually sourced by Henke from photographs of sculptures by the Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943). The chunky, innocent brawn of Vigeland’s forms – here, green and tarnished – was counterbalanced by the gelatinous clarity of the plastic encasements that – folds exposed – looked conspicuously like the clear plastic on cigarette cartons (further proof: a matchbook graced the exhibition invite). One might call this a reified timeline – art history refracted by its material housing. But to express this would be to ignore the refreshing interplay between fluid, faceless forms pitted against the near-transparent, cut-and-dry formats of everyday, serialized experience (boxes, cigarettes, urinals).

It’s no wonder that Henke lives between New York and Frankfurt (where she studied under Michael Krebber at the Städelschule), given that both cities, though at different ‘Mascales, contain radical extremes of everyday grit and moneyed posturing. Looking at her works is like looking at a MoMA poster on a bus shelter: vivid and once-earnest, but by now key-scratched and defaced. Likewise, the works’ most immediate effect is their heavy antagonistic force: scenes of blocked passageways or covered-up signage, like the blank, sparse planes from Core, Cut, Care. These opposing impulses (heaviness and levity, colour and whitewash, abstraction and reference) are often pitted against each other in the same piece: take the saddle-like blobs in Schlangen im Stahl (Snakes in the Stable), shown at 2011 at Galerie Parisa Kind in Frankfurt. Abstract, molded fiberglass forms, looking somewhat like plastic bags or tarpaulin, recalling horse saddles frozen in motion, though improbably balancing on consumer goods like men’s deodorant and tobacco tins.

Hang Harder, Installation view, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, 2012 (courtesy: the artist & Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt)
In Henke’s first institutional solo show, Hang Harder, at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in 2012, a series of wooden panels, layered over with tar and epoxy resin, rested atop basic folding steel chairs which were turned against the wall. Tar is used in industrial settings both to solidify and to cover up a surface – to naturalize it and neutralize it, in a way. But, as Henke mentions in a conversation with Judith Hopf, recently published in Mousse, tar was an indirect way of channeling Richard Serra. Indeed, it’s hard, when looking at these works, given the duplicity between absolute black and tar’s uneasy sheen, to see past the reference to the intractable figure’s almost tyrannical brand of Minimalism – channeled in Henke’s pieces comically placed atop chairs used for their ease of removal.

Henke’s works are often about confusing the literal and figurative senses of a phrase, taking a principle to its contradictory limit point: abstraction turned impossibly concrete, and Minimalism pushed to its maximal extreme. Of course, it takes a deliberate cynicism to see this – a cynicism not foreign to Henke’s deliberately stiff, hardened objects. It’s the quandary shared by logicians and the insane that the most mapped-out arguments, like artistic movements, when taken rigidly, often collapse into contradiction.
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source: marlde

Lena wurde 1982 im ostwestfälischen Warburg geboren und lebt und arbeitet in New York. Das künstlerische Ergebnis ihrer intensiven Auseinandersetzung mit der einzigartigen und herausragenden Sammlung des Skulpturenmuseums in Marl ist – ein Comic-Strip. Unter dem Titel „Yes, I’m pregnant” hat Henke Skulpturen ausgewählt, in Foto-Collagen neu gruppiert, mit Sprechblasen versehen und zu Protagonisten einer Liebesgeschichte gemacht, die im Stil einer Foto-Lovestory einschlägiger Jugendmagazine daherkommt. So möchte sie vor allem junge Leute ansprechen und neugierig machen auf die zeitlose Ästhetik und die ungebrochene Gültigkeit der Meisterwerke von Bildhauern wie Hans Arp, Rudolf Belling, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Dierke und Marino Marini.