Horizontale & Vertikale Skulptur: Lena Henke

A vast, desolate desert landscape—barren and untouched, bathed in ochre light. Children in old-fashioned clothing play with baby dolls, their movements monotonous, almost resigned. They feed the dolls, cradle them in their arms—a symbol of the traditional notion of girls as future mothers and caregivers. Suddenly, the atmosphere shifts. A massive shadow falls over the children. Slowly, the camera tilts upward, revealing an enormous, majestic figure: Barbie played by Margot Robbie, clad in a black-and-white striped retro swimsuit. She towers over the children like a goddess, her presence overwhelming and sublime. The children gaze up at her in awe, their eyes widening. Instead of continuing to play with their baby dolls, the girls, with growing excitement, begin to smash them. Doll limbs fly through the air, heads crash to the ground. In the opening scene of Greta Gerwig’s box-office hit Barbie, which swept over the globe and broke the internet with its pink Barbiecore in 2023, the oversized doll serves as a monumental object of reverence, forcing a cultural shift as the girls, like the apes encountering the monolith in Kubrick’s original Dawn of Man-sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, witness a new paradigm—destroying their old dolls as they come face to face with an elevated, transformative symbol.

Henke’s towering horse hoof and its rider’s extremities—steeped in both archaic form and contemporary material—emerge in the corner space of Galerie Thomas Schulte like a monolith, its unexpected appearance calling attention to the shifting dynamics of power, gender, and form. The new sculpture Vertikale Skulptur, measuring 3.6 meters in height, is tightly installed, making it impossible to grasp the room as a whole, except from the outside—more concerned with the ability to move than with framing the space. Henke’s work is often laden with references to seemingly unconventional fascinations and paraphilia, such as the giantess fetish or crush fetish, in which sexual arousal is associated with observing objects being crushed or being crushed oneself. One foot in reality and one foot in their face! (1) Through the oversized foot(2) and hoof motifs, her work explores the material and symbolic power of feet, blurring the lines between sensuality, domination, and architectural form.

Having a crush on someone. Or: Falling head over heels in love.

Covered in a thick layer of orange-colored granulated rubber (a nod to her ongoing car tires series) traditionally used for playgrounds and tennis courts, Henke’s installation transforms the gallery space into what Rosalind Krauss calls an “alternative public square”. Or a “fast surface”, using Richard Serra’s words in conversation with Hal Foster, “skin as an outgrowth of volume, returning you to the space of the void”.(3)

The hoof replaces the conventional pedestal of the sculptural monument and enters the moment of real (echt) reference. The sculpture itself is segmented into different components demarcated by white lines that separate its orange skin. Just like a plastic surgeon draws the prospective cuts on their patient’s body or a butcher marks the various edible parts of an animal. From nose to tail (the whole beast).(4)

Lena Henke’s work also recalls the remarkably unknown medieval tale of Phyllis and Aristotle(5), in which the philosopher, having warned Alexander the Great against the perils of love, finds himself ensnared by desire and humiliated as Phyllis (Alexander the Great’s amant) saddles and rides him like a horse. This narrative, a cautionary reflection on the power of seduction over intellect, echoes themes present in Henke’s sculptures, where the dynamics of dominance, submission, and transformation unfold. Drawing from the concept of pony play, a subcategory of BDSM in which participants assume equine or owner roles through costume and performance, her work highlights the erotic charge embedded in human-animal dynamics. This examination of physicality and social coding continues in response to the window panes that were damaged, as Henke places three small casts of Saint Barbara, the patron saint of architects. The superimposition of damaged glass and the female figure of the saint intertwines body and space, destruction and protection—and at the same time makes the traces of urban aggression visible. Drawing on apotropaic traditions, the saint becomes a mediator between vulnerability and resistance, between architectural shell and social conflict.

Spanning across the gallery floor in an L-shaped arrangement, Henke’s industrial subway grates add another layer to the exhibition’s exploration of space, movement, and the urban environment. These grates, often overlooked in their mundane function as elements of city infrastructure, are repurposed here as boundary markers that define both physical and psychological thresholds. Their placement—marking the divide between the front and back space—creates a subtle but powerful commentary on the way architecture and design dictate our experience of the world. With their associations to public spaces and hidden subterranean worlds, the grates bring an unsettling tension to the gallery, transforming the space into a liminal zone where the domestic and the urban collide. Whereas their function as display predominates over the horizontal work in the back space; they guide visitors in the Corner Space towards the rear of the large-scale sculpture, subtly steering the spectator closer to the work while also offering a sense of separation and concealment, embodying Henke’s exploration of space and authority.

At the corner where Charlottenstraße and Leipzigerstraße intersect, stands Berlin’s earliest fashion department store, which today houses Galerie Thomas Schulte. Three large arched windows draw attention from afar. On the sides, each is adorned with a female figure—could this be a sister of Diana in the courtyard of the Alte Nationalgalerie, raising her arm to draw arrows from her quiver and shoot them at the cars rushing by on the four-lane street? Or is it just a decorative (mannequin) figure, standing there naked and waiting to be clothed? Unlike her hardworking relatives—the caryatids—she doesn’t even have to bear a decorative pediment or an architrave.

Similar to how many building facades carry the history of the city—bullet holes, cracks, and shards as remnants of the Battle of Berlin in the spring of 1945—like scars on its skin, the surface of the female body in the second part of the exhibition is uneven, vulnerable, and riddled with holes. For Horizontale Skulptur, Henke takes on a different angle, inverting the relationship between sculpture and architecture. A 2.5 meter-long amorphous body where human and animal forms blend into one, floats horizontally in the space. Made from carved styrofoam that has been cast in aluminum, its presence is revealed in the meticulous, chased finish despite the cheapness of its material—often associated with mass production and industrial use. “People like to look at animals, even to learn from them about human beings and human society. People in the twentieth century have been no exception. We find the themes of modern America reflected in detail in the bodies and lives of animals. We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves.” (6) Returning to the imagery of the horse: a long, segmented horse’s joint held by two dark brown leather reins interwoven with the bust and face of Saint Barbara.

Barbara. Bellmer. Barbie. St. Barbara. Barbarians.

This hybrid form, intermingling the sacred and the profane, juxtaposes the saint’s severed breast with the animalistic limb, invoking both religious symbolism and a sense of anatomical alienation. A modern-day Haraway cyborg? The figure of Saint Barbara, often portrayed holding a tower with three arched windows (just like the Corner Space of the gallery) as her attribute, is commonly a symbol of resistance, strength, and sacrifice(7). Yet here, Henke reimagines her not only as a holy figure but as a prosthetic, a body deconstructed and reassembled, as though the limb and breast were artefacts of some forgotten war or architectural trauma. Cast in different tones, the sisters of this work will embark on journeys to exhibitions in New York, Athens, and Lisbon this year.

Lena from Warburg. Lena from New York. Lena from Berlin. Lena the stranger. L’étrangère.

Text by Leonie Herweg

1. Katharine Gates, “Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex”, Juno Books, 1999, p.128.
2. ‘[F]or the fetishist, only the fetish (and nothing but the fetish) can satisfy the need at hand: fur, not silk; feet, not hands.’  Elena Gorfinkel & John David Rhodes, “The Prop”, Fordham University Press, 2025, p.47.
3. Richard Serra and Hal Foster: “Conversations about Sculpture”, Yale University Press, 2018, p. 135.
4. A cookbook by Fergus Henderson
5. Henri de Valenciennes, “Lai d’Aristote”, 1220.
6. Donna Haraway, “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Past Is the Contested Zone: Human Nature and Theories of Production and Reproduction in Primate Behaviour Studies”, 1991, p.21.
7.  Barbara of Nicomedia (from the Greek Βάρβαρα, “the stranger”) is a Christian saint. According to tradition, she was a Christian virgin and martyr of the 3rd century. It is said that she was beheaded by her father, Dioscuros, because she refused to renounce her Christian faith and her virginal devotion to God.