Henrike Naumann, a sculptor whose installations composed of furniture and design objects associated with East Germany’s troubled past made her a star of the German art scene, died on Saturday at 41.
Her death preceded one of her biggest projects to date: the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where the Berlin-based artist is set to represent the nation alongside Sung Tieu this year. The Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), the organization that facilitates the German Pavilion, said in a statement that she died of a “short, serious illness.”
“With Henrike Naumann’s passing, we have lost not only a significant figure in contemporary German art, but also a warm-hearted, insightful, and highly committed individual,” ifa said. “Her legacy lives on – in her works, in the numerous international collaborations she initiated, and in the many people who were inspired by her thinking and work.”
Naumann’s art was by turns disturbing, intriguing, and heartfelt, attesting to a Germany that remains unsettled well after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Often working with ready-made objects that she acquired and assembled to form installations, she produced art that seemed ordinary, perhaps even a little banal, which was by design. Her “aesthetic of reunification,” as she termed it, was intended to feel eerily familiar.
She sourced many of the objects through eBay Kleinanzeigen, a website through which Germans can sell their goods to one another. “I read and research a lot as part of my process, but I really start to create the language to express a certain idea in an installation by looking at what people do, at how they post their furniture—usually on my phone,” she told Pin-Up in 2022.
In another interview conducted that same year for Bomb, she said, “I love to look for things that I think cannot exist. And then it often turns out they do exist. And then I need to get them.”
The objects she acquired sometimes had histories that seemed impossibly rich. For one 2018 show at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany, she featured a painted portrait of the conservative politician Birgit Breuel, who served as president of the controversial Treuhandanstalt, a holding firm that supervised East German assets following reunification. Naumann discovered the painting in the archives for Expo 2000, a World Expo held in Hanover that Breuel helped lead. Critic Kito Nedo reported in Frieze that the painting had been gifted by the United Arab Emirates to the German Pavilion at that event. “In this weird, telling picture, the capitalist manager is depicted as a force in the ‘wilderness’ of an empty, postsocialist landscape,” Nedo wrote.
Henrike Naumann, 14 Words, 2018.
Courtesy the artist and MMK Frankfurt
Another memorable installation from 2018, titled 14 Words, involved the acquisition of the entire interior of a flower shop. Shown at the MMK Frankfurt museum that year, the installation may have seemed innocent to those unfamiliar with the history surrounding it, which was decidedly dark. The piece’s title obliquely referred to the slogan used by a neo-Nazi; Naumann connected that white supremacist to the National Socialist Underground, a German group whose racist killings targeted such people as Enver Şimşek, a Turkish-born German who operated a flower shop in Nuremberg when he was murdered in 2000.
Yet the vast majority of the objects Naumann’s installations did not appear to contain objects imbued with narratives like that one. Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft), from 2019, featured a carpet, a couch, a rotary phone, and other objects that would have been familiar to most residents in the GDR. Naumann placed these objects on the wall of KOW gallery, where items that normally might have appeared on a wall—framed portraits and the like—were exhibited on the floor. With this exhibition, Naumann created “spaces that mixed Nazi lineages and ecstatic rave culture, the Stone Age and the GDR, to refute simplistic characterizations of the East before and after reunification,” Emily Watlington wrote in Art in America.
Henrike Naumann was born in 1982 in Zwickau, East Germany. She spent much of her early years with her grandparents while her parents continued their studies. Her grandfather, Karl Heinz Jakob, worked in the GDR, and so, she told Bomb, “my early art education was impacted by a socialist understanding of art and education as things that should be accessible for everyone in society.”
Installation of “Henrike Naumann: Re-education,” 2022, at SculptureCenter, New York.
Courtesy SculptureCenter
Rather than studying painting or sculpture, as artists tend to do, she instead enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden’s program for costume and stage design. Then, at the Film University Potsdam-Babelsberg, she studied set design for film and television productions, graduating in 2012. She attributed her artistic approach to her education. “I want to make sense of every angle, conceptually and literally,” she told Pin-Up.
One of her earliest mature works was an installation about the National Socialist Underground, the group that killed Şimşek, the subject of 14 Words. Some of the NSU’s members lived in Zwickau, the city where Naumann was born, though this didn’t come to light until 2011. The year afterward, Naumann produced Triangular Stories (2012), an installation containing what purported to be home videos belonging to NSU members. In fact, even though they seemed to have been shot in 1992, these videos had been newly produced by Naumann.
In the decade and a half after that installation, Naumann ascended quickly in Germany’s art scene. In 2022, she exhibited at Documenta 15 via the Ghetto Biennale, a participant that was nominated to bring on other artists of its choosing. This year, she will become one of the few East German artists ever to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale.
Internationally, she was also beginning to receive greater exposure, thanks in part to her US debut at SculptureCenter in 2022. That show featured the installation Horseshoe Theory (2022), in which Naumann arranged chairs, stools, and other pieces of furniture in a U shape, referencing the memeified design theory that the right and the left wings are more aligned the further one moves from the political center.
Viewers who knew little about the GDR might have struggled to keep up with Naumann’s references, but she insisted that her work remained legible to those audiences, if not on an intellectual level, then on an emotional one. “You can obviously bring in aspects of theory to be decoded, but furniture, to me, belongs to public, political memory,” she told Pin-Up.
