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.

Text by Laura McLean-Ferris: 
"If you are in the presence of a Barbara, you should be aware that you might be in a place where explosions are possible. For those who work in the crackle of fires, furnaces, explosives, kilns, foundries, and in the bowels of the earth, Saint Barbara is the patron saint and protector. While miners often place her effigy at the entrance to tunnels and caves to protect them, certain metalworkers place figurines of Saint Barbara on top of their furnaces to ward off accidents.
There is a Barbara at the art foundry in Berlin where Lena Henke created her aluminum sculpture Unforced Error (2025), a large prone figure that seems to be in the process of metamorphosis. It has one human leg with a horse’s hoof and a bulbous midsection of polymorphic buttock and belly-like protrusions that summon the burgeoning flesh of Hans Bellmer’s poupée experiments: photographs of disassembled and reassembled doll parts, and of the body of his partner, Unica Zürn, tied with ropes so that her flesh bulged uncannily like that of a grotesque doll, often appearing as though headless. Unforced Error has one single, large female breast and her head is a copy of the one on the foundry’s own Barbara figurine. With this localized appropriative gesture, Barbara is tied forever to the fiery scene of her birth and has been transmuted into not only an angel of the metalworkers and fabricators, but also of artists and sculptors. With her site-specific face, Barbara becomes a kind of pure sculpture, and the coincidence of her name with that of Barbara Hepworth, a creator of powerful, heavy-duty Modernist sculptures in bronze, stone and wood, duplicates and diffuses the identity of ‘Barbara’ as both artist and muse.
That the head of Barbara should be attached to this chimerical body is noteworthy, given that Saint Barbara of legend was decapitated by her father. Barbara’s story, appearing in 7th century, is of doubtful origin, and has the salacious tang of fantasy. According to legend, she was a 4th century virgin kept in a tower by her father, who wanted to protect her from potential suitors. Unbeknownst to her pagan father, Barbara secretly converted to Christianity, organizing the installation of three windows in her tower to signify the Holy Trinity. Catastrophe ensues. Barbara refuses marriage and is tortured, her wounds miraculously heal, she flees, and performs miracles, but is ultimately beheaded by her father, offering a prayer as she dies, and becoming a Christian martyr. Her father is immediately struck down by lightning and turned to ashes. Her legend’s relationship with explosive electricity became seared on the public consciousness, particularly in the 15th and 16th centuries, when she was the subject of several popular mystery plays in France. Where Barbara is depicted in paintings, she is almost always pictured with a tower, one that often resembles the ominous Tower Card of a tarot deck or a Tower of Babel. A notable exception is a 1437 drawing on oak panel by Jan Van Eyck, which shows Barbara seated in front of a tower that resembles Cologne Cathedral. Unusually, is a drawing on a wooden panel with a painted sky, leading to some uncertainty about whether it is intended as a finished work or not. If it is, it is the oldest surviving drawing by any artist.
“I live alone in a round tower chamber,” writes Unica Zürn in her novella The Trumpets of Jericho (1968), a hallucinatory text located in artist and writer’s experiences of birth, motherhood, psychedelics, and psychological fracturing. But if Zürn’s protagonist is a Barbara-like figure, her tower might be her own body, which appears as one in which multiple consciousnesses struggle to break out from. “The clouds today look like indecent bodies in impossible entanglements,” she writes, as though looking out of windows, looking out of eyes that are windows. Zürn often wrote anagrammatically, disassembling and reassembling phrases and words to arrive at original combinations, creating new, poetic meanings, but also retaining a cryptographic sense of the occult, of coded meanings and spells. New hybrid sentences are born, though they are almost untranslatable, being reliant on the rearrangement of letters from the words of the German in which they were originally written.
Henke’s language is one that is also split, translated, and recombined, from vocabulary of forms that she has been developing over the past few years, one that also passes between German and English contexts. She has been refining, for years now, the form of a foot on a horse’s hoof, which has appeared in many different scales and manifestations. Her new variations on this subject are the most visceral- that I remember seeing - the feet that sit atop the hoof almost seem as though they have been slashed at the ankle - bringing to mind the anatomical horse studies of a painter like George Stubbs. This focus on anatomy, however, and the layering of one animal foot on the other, newly suggest the real and allegorical speeds of various animals, in the way that sports car logos do. A horse, a human, and a puma all flicker in and out of focus in the new series, as do elements grounded in her German past, including horse fields and automobile manufacturers whip past our eyes like a landscape.
To make the “indecent body” of Unforced Error, Henke amalgamated elements from many of her previous sculptures and studies, including human legs with horse hooves and single breasts, into one body, together with the head of the Barbara. To create this new combination of shapes, she carved freehand into blocks of polystyrene, a material reminiscent of the “clouds” seen from the window of Zürn’s tower. Though light and easy to handle, polystyrene is difficult to cast in aluminum, and its porous structure creates a surface pockmarked with tiny holes, rendering parts of the sculpture fragile and spongelike. Combined with the green verdigris produced by the oxide coating applied to the Athenian iteration of the sculpture, the figure seems both rigidly brittle and softly plastic. A moss-covered or moldy creature, or a dried, lichen-covered husk that has surfaced from the earth. A truly exquisite corpse."

LIBRARY PROJECT:  
As part of her exhibition Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Lena Henke has invited a group of artists and writers to contribute to an intervention within the library space of ARCH. Building on the substantial existing book collection of ARCH, this initiative proposes the creation of a new, temporary section to be on view throughout the exhibition. Following its conclusion, this curated selection will be donated to the ARCH library as a lasting addition to its holdings.
The artist frames this intervention through Simon Baier’s recent proposition of a Carrier Bag Theory of Sculpture, which suggests that “the potential of sculpture lies precisely in the fact that it is neither completely subsumed within nor completely removed from its […] context.” This resonates with her own approach—beginning with a haptic, site-specific process rooted in architecture that gradually evolves into something emotionally layered and indeterminate. The final outcome emerges from this intermediate space—neither fully fixed nor fully fluid. Lena Henke expresses her curiosity in how others reflect on the sculptural medium and its shifting contexts—what they find essential when dealing with form, material, meaning and history. At the core of this project is the idea of a collectively curated book selection. Each invited artist was asked to choose one publication that has been significant to their research or artistic development. Together, these titles form a diverse and reflective reading list—mapping the layered knowledge that underpins contemporary art practices and ideas about sculpture. This evolving collection offers a window into the intellectual and material terrain shaping current artistic discourse.

Participants:
Angharad Williams – Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, 1998, Vintage.
Asta Lynge – Canary Wharf, Architectural Fathers.
Bruno Zhu – Yukio Mishima, Life for Sale, 1968, Kodansha (English translation: Penguin Classics, 2019).
Cooper Jacoby – Ben Vickers & K Allado-McDowell (eds.), Atlas of Anomalous AI, 2020, Ignota Books.
Emil Sandström – Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital.
Esther Kläs – Bruce Chatwin, Songlines, 1987, Jonathan Cape.
Ian Cheng – Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, 1979, Methuen.
Iris Touliatou – Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1979, Harvard University Press (English edition, 1984).
Isabel Cordovil – Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects, 2001, Harvard University Press.
Isa Melsheimer – Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter, Collage City, 1984, MIT Press. Article: "Crisis of the Object. Predicament of Texture".
Julia Phillips – Jessica Benjamin, Beyond Doer and Done To, 2018, Routledge.
Lena Henke – Behind The Facts: Interfunktionen 1968–1975, 2006, Ediciones Polígrafa.
Marina Xenofontos – Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 2007, Duke University Press.
Nicole Wermers – Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980 (English translation: 1984), University of California Press.
Olga Balema – László Krasznahorkai, Satantango, 1985 (English translation: 2012), New Directions.
Rachel Harrison – Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World, 2020, Pushkin Press (English translation).
Rachel Whiteread – Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1951, Putnam (revised edition, 1966, Vintage).
Virginia Overton – William Edmondson: A Monumental Vision, 2020, Cheekwood and Vanderbilt University Press.

Artist:
Lena Henke

Exhibition Period:
05.06.2025–06.09.2025

Add to calendar 2025:06:05 19:00:00 2025:09:06 18:00:00 Europe/Athens Exploding Plastic Inevitable Exploding Plastic Inevitable - More informations on http://www.archathens.org/project/exploding-plastic-inevitable

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