Vanessa Henn
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, 1970
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Means of guidance, supervision and control have become an ever increasingly intrusive aspect of our everyday life. Under the pretence of "Health and Safety" an absurd amount of rails, signage and balustrades crowd the public space that we occupy. By employing either recycled materials or old fashioned manufacturing process, the artist's works evoke a sense of the familiar. Supposedly formal in their appearance, each work harbours a subversive meaning, which elevates the object from its benign purpose to a sculpture of exceptional beauty and conceptual function. It comes as no surprise then that Vanessa Henn has regularly re-explored the public space. Over the past decade a series of large scale interventions such as 'Drop' - a blown up sculpture in the shape of a discarded chewing gum currently installed in Heidenheim, Germany or 'Kompass' a public signage sculpture in Villingen-Schwenningen to name a few - have become a central aspect of Henn's practice.
Biography
Vanessa Henn was born in Stuttgart in 1970 and lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart from 1992 to 2001, spent 1995 to 1996 at Edinburgh College of Art, and took a Master of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art in Christchurch, New Zealand (1999 to 2000).
Henn makes objects and installations based on the fittings that steer people through public space, such as handrails, railings, signposts, stairs, bridges and fences. Her handrails run along walls or project into rooms, and some stop short in the floor or ceiling, so that they no longer do their job. She works in steel, painted steel, wood and PVC.
Her works for public space include Kompass for the Berufsakademie Villingen-Schwenningen (2008), Drop, an enlarged discarded chewing gum, in Heidenheim (2010), and Follow Me! for the Emanuel-Lasker-Oberschule in Berlin (2019, realised 2020 to 2021). Solo exhibitions include railings and failings at Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart (2020 to 2021) and Soft Serve at Galerie Sturm & Schober, Vienna (2024). Group exhibitions include Mind The Gap at the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt (2020) and Konkrete Frauen / Neue Räume at the Kunstmuseum Ahlen (2025). She has received grants from the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg and the Stiftung Kunstfonds, a DAAD scholarship for New Zealand, and a residency at the Centro Internazionale di Scultura in Peccia, Switzerland, in 2022. Her work is in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin and the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch. The monograph Same Same, edited by Simone Schimpf, covers her work from 2019 to 2023.
At Bartha Contemporary, Henn had the solo exhibition Safe Guards in 2010 and took part in the group exhibition Works on Paper in 2012.