Lena Henke

Lena Henke shows 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 set its footprint down on the floors of what was once the earliest fashion department store in Berlin. 

Synthesizing an archaic formal language with contemporary production techniques, Henke probes the genealogies of sculptural history, mining the haptic and experiential. She confronts traditional sculptural conventions—from the Renaissance figure to the designed readymade—critically examining the patriarchal structures embedded within them.

Resisting sculptural stolidity, the hoof meets the ground, ready for ambulation. Stood heavy on the ground, connected to it as if a pedestal in itself. Finished with the granulated rubber, a material used in urban infrastructure, such as the building blocks of a children’s playgrounds, activate the gallery space as a “substitute for a public square”, in Rosalind Krauss' words (Sculpture in the Expanded field, 1979).

The second sculpture occupies the architecture in the opposite way. A piece of cast aluminum horizontally installed to float midair, renders an amorphous body merging the human and the animalistic. Henke’s sculptures return again and again to horses, whether in connection with changing urban infrastructures, psychograms, or fetishes. Individual animal body parts, equestrian accessories, or sex toys are morphed with human forms or things of the environment, their social dimensions reshaped and condensed into surreal landscapes and motifs.