Wrecking Ball

Lena Henke can trace much of her inspiration to three almost lifelong obsessions: her childhood in the country, near a farm in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany; urban architecture and master plans; and quirky sculpture parks created by one person. Ultimately, these creative triggers reflect a compulsion to excavate and examine the worlds and systems—big and small—that have impacted her life.

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“I grew up working outside, feeding animals, cleaning stalls,” the artist recalls inside her studio in Berlin, where she splits her time between New York. “I loved horses, but I could not wait to get a driver’s license and move to a city.” In fact, it was by selling her horse that she was able to buy a car. When she made it to the Städelschule art school in Frankfurt, she sold the car to buy a computer for making art.

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After graduating in 2010, Henke moved to New York City to kick off her career. One of her first shows was a kind of D.I.Y., bootleg exhibition that she organized with about 20 artist friends under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) where they set up installations and sculptures on dirty asphalt among pre-existing trash, like an unofficial and temporary art park. “That was when I got really into Robert Moses,” Henke says, referring to the infamous urban planner who essentially created the modern blueprint of New York City, including the BQE, which razed a path through several working-class neighborhoods. “He was so brutal. He wasn’t really interested in people; he was more interested in movement,” she explains in a video interview for the Swiss Institute about the work. “He created this outline, or this blueprint for New York, and I think this is what I am so interested in.”

“I am very drawn to certain materials... They often follow me
around like a little family.”
— Lena Henke

For various reasons related to family and healthcare, Henke and her husband, the politician Dr. Friedrich Paulsen, decided to return to Germany at the start of Covid. She kept her studio in Bushwick, a space in a building that many of her artist friends also work in, just in case. Berlin was the obvious choice, and Henke was thrilled when a friend offered her a small studio in an Alvar Aalto building within the Hansaviertel, an iconic, protected neighborhood near Berlin’s Tiergarten park. The area was developed in the 1950s as a “city of tomorrow” by today’s most celebrated mid-century architects, from Walter Gropius to Le Corbusier.

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“There’s an Oscar Niemeyer building,” Henke points out through her window, across the park, towards a structure on stilts. She gestures to a high-rise to the left of it: “And there, a Johannes van den Broek and Bakema.” Most people still lionize this starchitect-studded master plan—so much so that it’s almost impossible to find a space here. During the pandemic, with copious extra time to think and research in her new studio, Henke took a deep dive into the history of her new surroundings. Fairly quickly, she felt intrigued by the small kitchens. In the Giraffe building, a 17-story high-rise designed by Klaus Müller-Rehm and Gerhard Siegmann, separate wings are designated for men and women; the women’s studios are equipped with a full kitchen, while the men’s apartments only contain small cooking cabinets.

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In the universal embrace of mid-century architecture, we rarely talk about the systemic misogyny that is often tangled up in the design. This became very clear to Henke while looking at the kitchens in the buildings around her, all of which were conceived by men. “Many of the kitchens are closed off, obscured with a curtain,” the artist describes, “hiding the gendered labor.” She also researched the kitchen equipment, more than half of which was designed by German design hero Dieter Rams for Braun. That became the starting point for her 2022 exhibition “Auf dem Asphalt botanisieren gehen (‘To go botanizing on the asphalt’)” at Klosterfelde Edition, a gallery and publisher in Berlin that produces editions and publications for respected international artists.

Using textured rubber—which resembles asphalt, one of Henke’s favorite materials—and a 3-D printer, she replicated four of the Braun machines, from a mixer to a citrus press, that she found in the original kitchens. But the artist made them bigger and designed them with obvious flaws. The coffee machine is leaking; liquid explodes out of the mixer. Her remakes are a commentary on the ultimate failure of the design of systems that exclude women, “like female organic fluids oozing and spilling over and threatening the perfect, modern design of the objects.” Through this research, Henke also came across a video of a “kitchen designed for men,” by luxury kitchen company Poggenpohl in collaboration with Porsche. It sparked both a book and an exhibition that closed in January of this year, called “Good Year” at the contemporary art museum Marta Herford, located in her home state.

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Often this research materializes in multiple ways. “I have fun doing books,” she says, flipping through the manual of the Porsche kitchen that she created, with collages and actual slogans like “Prepare to be Seduced.” The exhibition at Marta was her version of a sleek Porsche “kitchen for men” prototype, an installation of stainless steel and crushed tires. At the entrance to the show was an enameled pot on a plinth. Its lid partly removed, the pot gave off the smell, describes Henke, of “wet cobblestones, grass, hay, and something dirty, like oiled fur or even the scent of an old gas station.” Adding an olfactory experience to her work was somewhat groundbreaking for the artist. Inspired by childhood memories of soup on the stove mixed with the smell of the rubber tires, the scent referred to her dreams of escape and racing away on the autobahn.

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In her German studio, Henke gestures to an experimental configuration of shapes squeezed through the center of tires. Reflecting on her current fascination with rubber, she explains she’s, “very drawn to certain materials ... They often follow me around like a little family.” Speaking of—Henke and her husband recently had their first child, a baby girl. The new addition to Henke’s world is already influencing her work in various provocative ways. She gestures to a drawing on a desk and explains she has started to draw with both hands at the same time, illustrating her new reality of consecutively caring, physically and mentally, for two things: her now-two-year-old daughter and her art. On the paper, dual columns of bright red spirals stand next to each other, like two fires spinning.