Biography
“Poetry is the gap, the blank space, the almost invisible crack in the water glass in front of you.” - Lena Marie Emrich
Lena Marie Emrich is a sculptor. Through the creation of each of her series, she explores new techniques, materials and systematically combines ancestral or artisanal elements with modern indicators of our time. Everything is tangled between the old, the new, the archaic, the contemporary: it weaves an invisible and subtle link between several eras. Throughout her work, we grasp a praise of contemplation, of short suspended moments, which appear like bubbles, frozen frames in an era where each micro-moment of boredom must be filled immediately. A major source of inspiration and reflection in the artistic practice of Lena Marie Emrich, the concept of time interferes in each of her pieces, in a more or less obvious way: it is discreet, variable, sometimes elusive, but omnipresent.
Emrich‘s work focuses on collaborative ways of working between craft and theory-based development. The thematic fields with which the artist works are carefully analyzed and investigated. Over the past years, Emrich has explored objects for their aesthetic and social relevance. Apart from sculpture there is always some excursions into performance and activations of public space. In 2022 she realized the stage and costume design for a theatre play „A girl‘s story“ based on the novel of Annie Ernaux. The audience will find themselves in a postfeminist, timeless sphere, where the actress goes through her traumatic experiences. This subtle, abstract and poetic discourse of social criticism nourishes her practice and thinking and functions as balance to the minimalist form language of her sculptures.
In her latest series Lena Marie Emrich dedicates her work to digital based marquetry produced in an industrial way and fulfilled by human touch.
In 2020 she won the Toy Award presented by the Berlin Masters Foundation. For 2021/2022 she was awarded for the Art Prize of the Kunstverein Hannover. In 2023 she received the NeuStartPlus Grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds to realize the project The Darkest Corners in Venice curated by Marlene Alice Schenk. In the same year she attented a Residency at Fondation Boghossian in Brussels.
Emrich has exhibited his work – both individually and collectively in Museums and Institutions including: Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, Kunsthaus Erfurt, Kunstverein Göttingen, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Kunsthal Bergen, Kunstverein Tiergarten Berlin, Sainte Anne Gallery Paris, Office Impart Berlin, Tobias Naehring Gallery Leipzig, Grisebach Düsseldorf and Giovanni Bonelli Milan.
Her works you can find in collections such as Burger Collection, Sprengel Museum, ADAC Collection, Arndt Collection and Marval Collection.
Works
Exhibitions
