Exhibitions


Press


Contact


Info


CLOSE

2025

Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal (forthcoming)
ARCH, Athens, Greece (forthcoming)
Bortolami, New York, USA (forthcoming)
Thomas Schulte Galerie, Berlin, Germany (forthcoming)

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

Close

Close

04.07.―16.09.2016
fat center trash land 1―7, 2016
Small scale Sculpture triennial Fellbach
Fellbach, Germany





The sculptor Lena Henke generally arranges her sculptural works in large-scale installations that form composite stage-like settings. Her interests include urban planning and architectural themes as well as human relationships, sexuality and fetishism. Henke’s formal language, materials and the spatial presence of her works often allude to Minimal Art, which she expertly subverts with humour and figurative elements.

Her work Trash center fat land consists of several cardboard cartons in which everyday technical goods were once packed and polished stainless steel replicas of them. The cartons balance on used glass bottles or hydraulic jacks that form unstable-looking pedestals for the sculptures. Before casting the objects, Henke cut windows and doors in the boxes. The sculptures look like doll’s houses; the whole assemblage recalls an urban topography. Inside the cartons, arranged like toy figures in houses, are more glass bottles. The artist collected them at one of New York City’s beaches, the historic Dead Horse Bay on Barren Island, sorted them into five groups according to their original contents – bottles that once contained medicinal products, alcohol, cosmetics, household agents as well as foodstuffs – and distributed them among the houses.

Following the outbreaks of cholera that persisted in the USA into the mid-nineteenth century, Barren Island became New York’s prime trash dump. To combat epidemics, sewerage and trash disposal systems were developed. In Chicago, entire buildings were jacked up to raise them out of the dirt. The largest waste-conditioning plants in the world were on Barren Island. The area was also a disposal site for coach horses, the remains of which, together with other waste from the metropolis, were processed into fertilizer, glue and soap – hence the name Dead Horse Bay, by which it is still known today. Until the 1930s and ’40s, the island was inhabited by land squatters who set up an autonomous, parallel society. The squatters were evicted and resettled in the wake of New York’s big spatial planning and reorganization drive, decisively planned and shaped by the urban planner Robert Moses. Later, land reclamation measures led to the draining of the marshy areas, and the island was now joined to Brooklyn and the mainland. Today, the artificial beach is subject to erosion, and the currents around New York see to it that the trash of past centuries of civilization keeps reappearing rather than vanishing. Henke assigns new meaning to these relics of civilization’s past by turning them into play figures in her model of a society created from recycled consumer-world leftovers.

–Muriel Meyer

  • 1 / 18
  • 2 / 18
  • 3 / 18
  • 4 / 18
  • 5 / 18
  • 6 / 18
  • 7 / 18
  • 8 / 18
  • 9 / 18
  • 10 / 18
  • 11 / 18
  • 12 / 18
  • 13 / 18
  • 14 / 18
  • 15 / 18
  • 16 / 18
  • 17 / 18
  • 18 / 18