When Lena Henke came to visit the Sitterwerk last summer, it was immediately clear that it would work. The Kunsthalle Zürich had asked us beforehand whether we might consider offering one of our guest studios to the German artist. Lena Henke is a sculptor and lives in New York. She moved into her temporary studio in the Sitterwerk’s large project studio at the end of August 2017 and has since then been working meticulously and with ever greater concentration on developing her solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which will open on March 2, 2018.
Born in Warburg in 1982, Lena Henke studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 2004 to 2010. Her sculptural works are made from a wide range of materials and preferably conceived as large-scale installations. Urban and spatial planning theories, relationship systems as well as recurring form elements such as horse and female bodies often play a decisive role in them.
Lena Henke is an intense person with a hunger for knowledge, who likes to think in large dimensions and contexts, but, in doing so, never loses sight of consciously positioning her work in art history and the tradition of sculpture. She explores and delves into her respective surroundings with an open mind. She consequently also immediately absorbed the creative environment of the Sitterwerk and the neighboring Kunstgiesserei and incorporated them in her creative process.
On her arrival in the Sitterwerk, Lena Henke had a first sketch of her exhibition in Zurich in her luggage: a small, spatial model of the Kunsthalle, which she made herself of cardboard, with initial ideas for sculptures, small toy machines, and structures made of chainmail. Shortly afterward, at the St.Gallen Museum Night, it was worked up in metal in front of the audience at the Kunstgiesserei’s traditional midnight casting.
This cast overview of the spatial situation at the Kunsthalle provides the starting point for Lena Henke’s solo exhibition. The small models have meanwhile been turned into human-size sculptures, and the toy tractors into grinding machinery that encompasses the space. It is controlled by superhuman powers—by a motor that seems to be located outside the walls of the Kunsthalle and be part of a larger whole. In the exhibition «An Idea of Late German Sculpture; To the People of New York, 2018», the art space becomes a city-like system in which the architectural landscape is shifted and altered anew each day.
On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, starting at 6 pm, Lena Henke will open her studio, give a talk, and provide initial insights into her work for the Kunsthalle Zürich
http://kunsthallezurich.ch/de/lena-henke-idea-late-german-sculpture-people-new-york-2018