In Good Year, Lena Henke transforms the Lippold Gallery into a multisensory environment that links memories of her Westphalian homeland with reflections on domestic labor, design history, and the ideals embedded in postwar consumer culture. A newly created scent sculpture, Marta L. Henke (2023), sets the exhibition’s tone by evoking regional smells, while her research into kitchens—especially those of Berlin’s Hansaviertel—yields enlarged, rubber-coated versions of iconic 1950s Braun appliances. These works reappear within P7340LH (2023), a monumental installation of nearly 2,000 compressed car-tire cubes referencing Poggenpohl’s P7340 “kitchen for men.” Combining associations of the domestic sphere, automotive freedom, and Minimal Art, Henke stages an ambiguous sculptural landscape where gendered power structures collide, further complicated by Richard Hamilton’s The Critic Laughs looping atop one of the massive blocks.
Extending these themes, a series of sculptures titled The Baby Will Always Be Me (2020) threads through the gallery via overhead power cables, linking a cyborg-child self-portrait to an oversized clothesline and scaled-down utility pole in a meditation on modernization and embodied labor. The exhibition culminates with Dreihasenbild (2015), a resin-hardened triskelion of intertwined hares that evokes cycles of life, time, and fertility. Throughout Good Year, Henke interrogates the sociocultural forces shaping space, design, and identity, drawing on art-historical references while developing her own recurring iconography. Her installations probe how sculpture can reshape perception, weaving together personal memory, material transformation, and the shifting hierarchies that structure everyday life.
