Henrike Naumann, one of the two artists who will represent Germany at the Venice Biennale in May, has died. The cause was cancer, recently diagnosed.
Naumann’s plans for the pavilion, which she shares with Sung Tieu, are ‘conceptually complete’ and will be realised according to her specifications.
Naumann was known for her work that used furniture, the language of interior design and questions of taste to explore political and historical narratives. Her 2019 installation Ostalgie (Primal Society) recreates an East German apartment, though the furniture and carpets were mounted on a vertical wall, flipping the sense of home on its side. In the video work Triangular Stories she featured Germans who have joined far-right brigades, and Desolation, a 2014 sound work, features a German former rapper who joined Syria’s Islamic State.
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 (the exhibitions closed after Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022). The same year, for her solo show at at the SculptureCenter in New York, she used brown traditional furniture, piled into a monolithic altar, to comment on the storming of the United States capitol building.
