Henrike Naumann


Henrike Naumann is a German installation artist. She became known for her furniture installations, often made from wall units from the 1990s. In her work, she explores 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 has 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 will design the German Pavilion together with Sung Tieu.

Life

Naumann is 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 describes the arson committed by and subsequent arrest of Beate Zschäpe on November 4, 2011 - during the exposure of far-right terrorist group National Socialist Underground - as a key moment in her artistic development. 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.
Naumann's first international exhibition took place at the 2015 Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Museum of Trance, 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. 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.
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. That same year, Naumann held her first solo exhibition Re-Education in the United States at the SculptureCenter in New York, where she used her experience with German history to examine American politics. Her installation Rustic Traditions explores the role of furniture in the 2021 storming of the United States capitol.
Naumann combines her artistic work with lecturing and teaching. In her lecture What Comes After Postmodernism 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 will take up a professorship in sculpture at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She lives in Berlin.

Projects

Selected works

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected works in public collections

Lecture series

What comes after Postmodernism?, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn 2023Foreign Agent, Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum, Tbilisi 2024Breathe, Screening und Gespräch mit Vasyl Cherepanyn, Kyiv Biennale, Berlin 2024Ossification, Harvard Art Museums, Boston 2024Orcs from the East, HFG Offenbach 2025

Publications

  • Henrike Naumann – Concepts, Bierke Books, Berlin 2024,
  • Henrike Naumann, Angela Schönberger, Andreas Brandolini, Matthias Kliefoth : Einstürzende Reichsbauten, DISTANZ Verlag, Berlin 2021,.
  • Henrike Naumann – 2000, Spector Books, Leipzig 2019,
  • Henrike Naumann - The Effects Can Last Forever, Goldrausch, Berlin 2014
  • Henrike Naumann – Triangular Stories, Diplomarbeit an der Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf”, Potsdam-Babelsberg 2012

Selected prizes, grants and residencies

Selected group exhibitions