My Beautiful Friend
22. March 2026 / Barbara London
I met Henrike Naumann in 2022 at a lively dinner in Kassel hosted by Tokyo-based writer Andrew Markel. The next day Henrike guided me and JoAnne Birnie-Danzker through The Museum of Trance, her work resembling a “postmodern winged altar” that she made with musician Bastian Hagedorn and installed among the organ pipes of St. Kunigundis Church. Curated by the Haitian collective Atis Rezistans for their Ghetto Biennale, Henrike had assembled 1990s furniture, metal pipes, and audio that referenced East German techno culture. I learned how Henrike seriously critiqued cold war history through her work.
A few months later, Henrike and her partner Clemens Villinger spent months in New York, where we often met for dinner. At the time, she was sourcing materials from far and wide for her upcoming one-person show at the Sculpture Center. Initially I was baffled by the small room carefully outfitted with artifacts referencing the Fred Flintstone TV animation series that ran on U.S. commercial television, 1960–1966. I realized how this series mirrored 1950s-60s American Cold War culture by portraying a suburban, consumerist life, and was a satire of post-WWII anxieties. In the Sculpture Center’s main gallery, Henrike masterfully created a Vladmir Tatlin-like enormous monument made of highboy dressers, which were accompanied by a panoply of “patrician” armchairs. Everything was sourced online or from antique markets, and everything had a questioning edge.
Henrike was one of the smartest, kindest, and most open and stylish people. I am very fortunate she entered my life. I am devastated that she departed this world much too soon. I hold her in my heart, as I do Clemens and their child.