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2025

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

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2015
Surrounding Audience
The New Museum Triennial
New York, USA
Press Release





Lena Henke’s installations cannibalize the sculptural tradition, engaging its history— particularly the legacy of Minimalism—in order to examine the intersection of materiality and manufacturing and the relationship between the sculptural object and the commodity. Henke often draws mass-produced objects and industrial materials into configurations that emphasize the artist’s intervention, fore- grounding the processes of their construction in order to explore the tension between the anonymous uniformity of everyday consumer goods and her emphatically worked materials. Intentionally employing demanding materials such as tar and steel, Henke simultaneously alludes to and undermines the masculine associations and pristine fabrication of Minimalist sculpture by insisting on constructing the work herself.

For the Triennial, Henke presents Grosse Stehende (2014), a monumental twelve-foot box made from translucent plastic that is suspended from the wall by a steel frame. The translucency of the box suggests a vulnerable skin girded by multiple bands of steel. On its surfaces, Henke has printed images of her “sandbag” sculptures—one-ton bags of sand that she molded into reliefs of human body parts, accompanied by masklike forms in chain- mail that have been sealed with clear resin so that they appear to uncannily hold their shape— which she cut out from installation shots from her2014exhibition“DIE.”Thebulbous,organic forms of these earlier sculptures contrast with the rigid geometry of the plastic boxes, which are hung from a metal armature, playing with ideas of absence and presence, image and object, lightness and weight.

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