"German artist Henrike Naumann, known for her installations of furniture and household objects addressing the turmoil of German reunification and showing how aesthetic choices affect political ideology, died in Berlin on February 14. She was forty-one. Her husband, Clemens Villinger, wrote in a statement that her death arrived "after a cancer diagnosis that came far too late." Naumann had been set to represent Germany at the Sixty-First Venice Biennale, opening this spring alongside Vietnamese German artist Sung Tieu."
""Naumann's work opens thresholds between private and public scenes of assimilation, placing viewers into tableaux where political culture is articulated as a myth of the past, present, and future: a thing that furnishes all of our lives," wrote Kerstin Stakemeier in a 2022 issue of Artforum. Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau, in what was then East Germany, in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She studied stage and costume design at Dresden's Academy of Fine Arts and scenography in Potsdam."
Henrike Naumann was born in Zwickau, East Germany, in 1984 and trained in stage, costume design, and scenography in Dresden and Potsdam. She created installations using secondhand copies of 1980s furniture and home goods to explore how aesthetic choices shaped social and political assimilation after reunification. Her work juxtaposed everyday domestic banality with the larger cultural and ideological shifts following the melding of East and West. Notable projects include the 2012 Triangular Stories, imagining the teenage bedrooms of members of the National Socialist Underground. She was chosen to represent Germany at the Sixty-First Venice Biennale. She died in Berlin on February 14 at forty-one after a late cancer diagnosis; the planned pavilion will proceed.
Read at Artforum
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]