Henrike Naumann, the visionary sculptor whose installations used domestic furniture to interrogate East Germany’s complex sociopolitical past, died on Saturday aged 41, according to artnews.com. Her passing comes just months before she was set to represent Germany at the prestigious Venice Biennale.
The Berlin-based artist was scheduled to showcase her work at the German Pavilion alongside Sung Tieu. In a statement, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) confirmed Naumann died following a “short, serious illness,” describing her as a “significant figure in contemporary German art” whose legacy would endure through her provocative international collaborations.
Born in Zwickau, East Germany, in 1984, Naumann developed what she termed an “aesthetic of reunification.” Her work often utilised “ready-made” objects, sourced from classified ad sites like eBay Kleinanzeigen, to create immersive environments that felt eerily familiar yet deeply unsettling.
Naumann’s background in film set and costume design heavily influenced her practice. She eschewed traditional sculpture to build “spaces” that bridged the gap between the banal and the extremist, often linking 1990s furniture trends to the rise of far-right ideologies in post-Socialist Germany.
“I love to look for things that I think cannot exist,” Naumann told Bomb magazine in 2022. “And then it often turns out they do exist. And then I need to get them.”
Naumann’s art frequently tackled uncomfortable truths about modern Germany such as“14 Words” (2018), an installation featuring the entire interior of a flower shop, referencing the National Socialist Underground (NSU) murders and “Horseshoe Theory” (2022), her US debut at SculptureCenter, which used furniture arrangements to explore the political theory that the far-left and far-right eventually converge.
Naumann was a rare voice in the high-art world, bringing an East German perspective to global platforms like Documenta 15. Despite the heavy academic and political themes, she maintained that her work was designed to be felt emotionally by anyone who had ever sat on a sofa or walked through a showroom.
She is survived by a body of work that remains a haunting, essential mirror to Germany’s unsettled identity.
•Featured image: Henrike Naumann/Victoria Tomaschko
