ARCH is pleased to announce the exhibition Exploding Plastic Inevitable by artist Lena Henke. 

Lena Henke lives and works in New York City and Berlin.

The artist tests the conditions and possibilities of sculpture with technically innovative methods of production. At the same time, she expands the range of meaning of traditional sculpture by incorporating questions of femaleness and the production of power relations in urban space. The possibilities of plastic art and sculpture serve Henke as a basis for understanding the molding (and casting) of bodies as a changeable process of design. Thus, in groups of works like Hooves, Boobs, and Sand Bodies, the process by which the work becomes a work finds representation; motifs of memesis link up with motifs of phantasmagoria; and it becomes apparent that the artist does not take her bearings from ideal conceptions but designs her sculptural figures to match her subjective mental images. In doing so, she not only engages the myth of masculinity; she also works with the strands of historical tradition—the questions of pedestal and space—to interrogate the logic of sculptural representation and representability. She holds the reins with great self-assurance, controlling the representation of women's bodies and the symbolic power of horses and intervening in the mechanisms of urban architecture. It is Henke’s far-reaching reflections on the capacity of the sculptural that enable her, conversely, to grasp urbanity as a historically evolved sculpture, whose social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion can be altered and redefined by means of targeted interventions. Thus, Henke relocated the entrances to her exhibitions and intervened, with her street signs, in the psychology of existing urban structures. Operating this side of social and architectural power structures, Henke's works open up a highly pleasurable imaginative space in which the sculptural itself expands to encompass feminist and biographical perspectives and thus acquires a new topicality.

Henke has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2018); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2018); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2017); Sprengelmuseum Hannover (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); Timisoara Contemporary Art Biennale, Romania (2017); Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); The 9th; Berlin Biennale (2016); La Biennale de Montréal, (2016); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2016); Triennale of Small Scale Sculpture, Fellbach, Germany (2016); S.A.L.T.S., Basel (2016); The New Museum, New York (2015); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2015); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2014); Kuenstlerhaus Graz, Austria (2014); White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2014); Sculpture Museum Glaskasten, Marl (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2013) and Kunstverein Aachen, Germany (2012), among others.

Henke is the recipient of several prestigious awards and grands including the Marta Herford Award of Wemhoner Foundation (2022), the 8th RUBENSFORDERPREIS of the city of Siegen, Germany in cooperation with the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst Siegen and Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (both 2019). In 2024 she was named artist of the year by the arts organization Topical Cream, New York. 

Her work has been discussed in numerous publications including Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, The New York Times, Artnews and Spike magazine, in addition to several exhibition catalogues. 

In 2013, Henke co-founded M/L Art Space, a collaborative curatorial project that usually resides in the streets and semi-public spaces of New York. 

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS 

Henke’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;  Kunstsammlung des Bundes, Berlin; Kunstsammlung des Bundes Bonn, Germany; Belvedere Museum Vienna, Austria; Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Florida; the MAMCO - the modern and contemporary Art Museum, Geneva, Switzerland; Sammlungsverbund Wien, Vienna; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York; Skulpturen Park Köln, Cologne, Germany; Skulpturen Museum Glaskasten Marl, Germany, Heidi Horten collection Vienna; MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.