Henrike Naumann
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Henrike Naumann | |
|---|---|
 Naumann in 2019 | |
| Born | 1984 Zwickau, East Germany |
| Died | (aged 41) Berlin, Germany |
| Education | Dresden Academy of Fine Arts Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Known for | Installation art |
| Website | henrikenaumann |
Henrike Naumann (1984 – 14 February 2026) was a German installation artist. She became known for her furniture installations, often made from wall units from the 1990s. In her work, she explored the relationship between furniture and interior design with political and social issues. Her unconventional approach to complex political issues has garnered broad media attention. Naumann received numerous awards, including the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Fellowship, the Max Pechstein Prize from the city of Zwickau, and the Villa Aurora Scholarship from the Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles. Major exhibitions of her work have taken place at the SculptureCenter in New York, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Documenta in Kassel and the Kyiv Biennal in Ukraine. At the 61st Venice Biennale in summer 2026, Naumann was set to design the German pavilion together with Sung Tieu.[1]
Naumann was the granddaughter of artist Karl Heinz Jakob, who was also awarded the Max Pechstein Prize. She studied stage and costume design at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and scenography at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg.
She described the arson committed by and subsequent arrest of Beate Zschäpe on 4 November 2011 – during the exposure of far-right terrorist group National Socialist Underground – as having been a key moment in her artistic development.[2] At the time, Naumann was only a few hundred meters away, visiting her grandmother in the Weißenborn district. Deeply affected by these events, she addressed the origins of the National Socialist Underground in post-reunification East Germany in her thesis project Triangular Stories.[3]
Naumann's first international exhibition took place at the 2015 Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Museum of Trance,[4] created in collaboration with Bastian Hagedorn, marked a shift from earlier works integrating video and sound, towards objects that speak for themselves.
In her 2017 work Das Reich, Naumann recreated Stonehenge made of wall units at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin to address the Reichsbürger movement at the historic site where the Unification Treaty was signed.[5] Her 2019 exhibition Ostalgie reflected on the legacy of the GDR during the 1990s. It demonstrated Naumann's radical approach to architecture by covering gallery's concrete walls with carpet and using them as flooring for her furniture, tilted at 90 degrees.[6]
In 2021, several of Naumann's works were exhibited simultaneously in Ukraine and Russia, including at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the exhibitions were closed. One of her works was evacuated from Kyiv through the war zone.[7] That same year, Naumann held her first solo exhibition Re-Education[8] in the United States at the SculptureCenter in New York, where she used her experience with German history to examine U.S. politics. Her installation Rustic Traditions (2022) explores the role of furniture in the 2021 storming of the United States capitol.[7]
Naumann combined her artistic work with lecturing and teaching. In her lecture What Comes After Postmodernism (2023)[9] at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, she reflected on her work at the 2023 Kyiv Biennal and the topic of art and war. Starting in the winter semester of 2026, she was to take up a professorship in sculpture at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She lived in Berlin.[10]
Naumann died from cancer in Berlin, on 14 February 2026, at the age of 41.[11][12]
