Henrike Naumann, German Installation Artist Selected for Venice Biennale Pavilion, Dies

Henrike Naumann, the German installation artist whose work examined post-reunification identity and far-right violence through staged interiors and found furniture, has died aged forty-one after what organisers described as a short, serious illness.

Her death on 14 February was confirmed by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, the body responsible for organising the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, where Naumann had been selected to represent Germany alongside artist Sung Tieu in a show curated by Kathleen Reinhardt. ifa said Naumann had worked to complete the conceptual framework for the presentation so that it could be realised in accordance with her plans.

Born in 1984 in Zwickau, in the former East Germany, Naumann drew on domestic design, architecture and material culture associated with the German Democratic Republic and the years following reunification. She described her approach as an “aesthetic of reunification”, assembling secondhand furniture and everyday objects into installations that addressed political memory, extremist networks and social change.

ifa said Naumann had been involved in its international touring exhibition EVROVIZION since 2021, a collaborative project shown mainly in eastern Europe. In a statement, the organisation said her work connected “aesthetic orders with geopolitical constellations and narratives” and described her as a committed participant in international exchange.

Naumann studied costume and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden and later scenography for film and television at the Film University Potsdam-Babelsberg, graduating in 2012. She linked her installation-based method to this training, stating in interviews that she developed ideas spatially and through object arrangements rather than through painting or sculpture.

Her early project Triangular Stories (2012) addressed the National Socialist Underground (NSU), the far-right terror group whose members lived undetected in Zwickau for several years and were responsible for a series of racist murders between 2000 and 2006. The installation used staged video and domestic settings to examine radicalisation and youth culture in eastern Germany during the 1990s, contrasting extremist and club scenes.

Subsequent works continued to explore how ideology is embedded in ordinary environments. 14 Words (2018), shown at MMK Frankfurt, recreated the interior of a closed flower shop and referred indirectly to the murder of Enver Şimşek, the first known NSU victim. Another installation, Das Reich (2017), presented nationalist and historical symbols in a stone-circle formation and referred to Reichsbürger movements that dispute the legitimacy of the modern German state.

In Tag X (2019), first shown in Dortmund, Naumann staged a retail-style interior based on so-called “prepper” networks linked to far-right groups. Design objects were arranged to suggest potential weapons, drawing connections between consumer culture and political violence. Other projects, including DDR Noir (2018) and Ostalgie (Urgesellschaft) (2019), combined postmodern furnishings with references to socialist-era art and architecture.

Naumann’s work was included in Documenta 15 in 2022 through the Ghetto Biennale collective. The same year, she had a US institutional debut at SculptureCenter in New York with the installation Horseshoe Theory (2022), which arranged chairs and stools in a curved formation referencing political theory and design history.

ifa said her work and planned Venice presentation would proceed.