Henrike Naumann, the influential German artist known for making politically charged installations out of mass-produced furniture and found household objects, died on February 14th in Berlin. She was 41. According to a statement shared on Monday by Naumann’s partner, Clemens Villinger, the artist died “after a cancer diagnosis that came far too late.”
She was preparing to exhibit her work alongside that of artist Sung Tien at Germany’s pavilion for the 61st Venice Biennale, which will be organized by curator Kathleen Reinhardt. It is scheduled to open this May. “Until the very end, she arranged objects to produce and implement her heartfelt project, the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale,” continued Villinger’s statement. “The exhibition in Venice was and is being realized in the same way that her career began: as a Gemeinschaftswerk, a collaborative effort, guided by Henrike’s artistic vision,”
The news was confirmed by IFA, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), which oversees the German pavilion. In a statement, they said: “It is with great sadness and sorrow that ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen bids farewell to Henrike Naumann, an extraordinary artist and personality who passed away on 14 February 2026 after a short, serious illness. Our heartfelt condolences and deepest sympathy go out to her family and all those close to her during this difficult time. Her death leaves a painful void – not only in the art world, but also in our work as an institution promoting international art exchange.”
Naumann was born in Zwickau in what was then East Germany in 1984, and her work reflected the geopolitical dynamics and rapid upheavals in German society after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. She often repurposed the cheap furnishings that populated East German homes in the 1990s after the reunification, and incorporated video and sound works to represent how this era contributed to extreme radicalization.
Her work has been shown at SculptureCenter in New York, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, among other institutions. She was awarded numerous prizes and fellowships including the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff postgraduate scholarship, the Max Pechstein prize from the city of Zwickau, and the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House fellowship.
Naumann studied costume and stage design at Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts before briefly working in scenography for television and film. In 2012 she created Triangular Stories, an installation that envisions the childhood bedrooms of neo-Nazi terrorists. In it, she included a Mickey Mouse figurine, baseball bat, and other objects of childhood play alongside the Imperial War flag popular with the extreme right. At the center, a television plays VHS home movies of the imagined inhabitant’s life. And in 2022, Naumann made her U.S. solo debut with the presentation of “Re-Education” at New York’s SculptureCenter, an exhibition that examined the use of furniture in the January 6th insurrection.
