Lena Henke: Horizontale & Vertikale Skulptur

In the organizer's words:

Lena Henke is showing two new sculptures at Galerie Thomas Schulte for Gallery Weekend Berlin 2025. In a site-specific treatment of the corner space, a towering horse hoof has placed its footprint on the floor of one of Berlin's earliest women's department stores.

By combining an archaic formal language with contemporary production techniques, Henke explores the genealogies of sculpture history and explores the haptic with the tangible. She explores traditional sculptural conventions - from the Renaissance figure to the designed readymade - and critically examines the patriarchal structures embedded in them.

The hoof, which resists sculptural rigidity, hits the ground and is ready to move. It stands heavily on the ground and is connected to it as if it were a pedestal itself. The execution in rubber granulate, a material used in urban infrastructure such as the building blocks of a children's playground, activates the gallery space as a "substitute for a public square", as Rosalind Krauss puts it (Sculpture in the Expanded field, 1979).

The second sculpture takes up the architecture in reverse. A piece of cast aluminum floating horizontally in the air forms an amorphous body in which the human and the animal merge. Henke's sculptures repeatedly return to the horse, whether in connection with changing urban infrastructures, psychograms or fetishes. Individual animal body parts, equestrian accessories or sex toys are fused with human forms or objects from the environment, their social dimensions transformed and condensed into surreal landscapes and motifs.