Artist Henrik Naumann used sofas, chairs and coffee tables to interrogate a divided Germany | Art and design

MWe have many colors and many layers. One grieves for people. But it is also possible to mourn a country, a system, or an ideology – even one that was deeply flawed. In 2019, artist Henrike Naumann built a living room in East Germany and rotated it 90 degrees. The sofa, chairs, and coffee table—all with an unmistakable ’90s aesthetic—climbed the wall. The carpet has become vertical. Lockers hovered close to the floor alongside a rack of CDs, baseball badges and a flag bearing a slogan in Sotterlin’s script: “Beware of storms, winds and angry East Germans.”

This artwork—titled Ostalgie (a combination of the German words for “east” and “nostalgia”)—made material what many felt but struggled to articulate: the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and its repercussions for those who lived through it and felt it as a loss on some level. This rupture was not abstract. The room tilted. You have shaken the ground beneath your feet.

Few artists have examined the emotional infrastructure of German reunification—and its global repercussions—with such force and clarity as Henrik Naumann, who treated the history of design as social history and redefined what political art could look like. She died this weekend, on February 14, at the age of 41, after being diagnosed with cancer too late. In just a few months, the world will see her work in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which she designed in conjunction with artist Song Teo, but now she will not be able to see it in its place.

Naumann was one of the first East German artists of the millennium to gain international recognition and has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices of her generation. Born in 1984 in Zwickau, in what was then the German Democratic Republic, she came of age in a unified but deeply dysfunctional landscape: two political systems, two ideologies and a myriad of “isms” that clashed and continue to vie for power and interpretation. That upbringing taught her early on that history is never individual or objective, no matter how much she insists on framing it that way.

After studying stage and costume design at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and scenography at the Konrad Wolff Film University Babelsberg, Naumann has worked as an artist for more than a decade. She has won numerous awards, her work has been entered into international collections and her work has been shown in museums, galleries and biennials around the world.

She became known for installations made from used furniture, design objects and video works – direct analyzes of specific historical moments. I have acquired many of her pieces on eBay from private individuals. In her hands, the cabinets, sofas and chairs became historical documents once again, carrying the biographies of their previous owners. History wasn’t just hanging on the walls; I sat with you in the room

At Haus der Kunst in Munich – a building built by the Nazis – armchairs from the Hitler era are placed alongside post-reunification wall units and decorative statues from the 1990s, revealing troubling aesthetic continuities across modern German history. At Documenta 2022, she presented a temple to the 1990s trance subculture, exploring the strange convergence of radicalism and hedonism that characterized that decade. In an exhibition at the Bundestag, she dissected the ideology of the Reichstag movement – ​​those who believe the German Reich still exists, who see themselves as a threatened people in an occupied country, and who stockpile weapons in preparation for an imagined reckoning. In another installation, she created the “Altar of Mourning for German Unity,” complete with a purple Milka funeral wreath bearing the inscription Der Deutschen Einheit – In Still Trauer (German unit – in silent mourning) – a gesture that is both humorous and disturbing at the same time.

Her personal background was always a starting point, a prism through which she examined broader political and social belief systems. However, part of her international success lay in the fact that her work did not remain limited to the East German landscape. I realized that the 1990s was not just a local story of weird interiors, neo-Nazis, and techno clubs, but a laboratory for understanding how societies metabolize rupture—and how political extremism does not begin and end with flags and speeches, but rather settles quietly in living rooms. In 2022, at the SculptureCenter in New York, she expanded this research, examining the role furniture played in the storming of the US Capitol in 2021. As she once said: “I think I like furniture because it’s something that everyone has. It’s not abstract—it’s something everyone can relate to.”

Last year, she examined the role of state artists in the German Democratic Republic and under National Socialism, while remaining conscious of her position within that lineage. And through its German Pavilion in Venice – rebuilt by the Nazis in 1938 and long a site of controversy – I realized that it, too, would be read as part of this national history.

In her work, history was a battlefield for novels. Nothing and no one stands alone. Every object and every space carries a past that shapes the present. I traced the connections between violent interruptions and regime changes, placing them along a continuum and asking what histories we have failed to think about together – what stories we have chosen not to see and where one stands within that history.

In one of her recent lectures, Nauman compared art to chocolate. Neither is necessary for survival. Both are luxuries. However, taste – like aesthetic experience – carries memory and emotion. It remains. We will notice its absence.

We will notice her. Henrik Naumann’s art changed the way we look at rooms, at objects, and at the seemingly placid surfaces of everyday life. In doing so, I was able to shed light on what is simmering beneath the surface – not just in Germany, but also far beyond.