ARCH - Lena Henke Edition

ARCH is proud to launch ARCH EDITIONS, a new initiative developed in collaboration with artists who have worked with us over the years. This endeavor celebrates our community and reflects our commitment to fostering lasting relationships while strengthening the artistic ecosystem we are honored to be part of.

Participant artists: Aliki Panagiotopoulou, Anna Lea Hucht, Athanasios Argianas, Joanna Piotrowska, Konstantinos Giotis, Lena Henke, Madeline Hollander, Patricia Treib, Polys Peslikas, Rowena Hughes, Tula Plumi, Yu Nishimura.

Lena Henke 

The Library Horses, 2026 

Set of two, glazed ceramic bookends with wooden back panel 

19 x 19 x 14 cm approx. each 

Editions of 25, +5 APs

Artwork © Lena Henke (2026) Courtesy the artist

Lena Henke (b. 1982, Germany, lives and works in New York and Berlin.

The edition consists of a pair of ceramic bookends in the form of horse heads. They were slipcast as miniatures from original sculptures produced by Henke during her residency at ARCH in Athens in 2024. Working in a terrace studio overlooking the Acropolis, Henke became interested in the fragmented bodies of horses encountered across the city’s classical sculptures, specifically the horse head from the Elgin Marbles. Translating these observations into ceramic, she explored deformation and malleability in clay, developing a mode of fragmentation that echoes the fractured condition of classical sculpture—figures that persist as partial bodies, often propped and incomplete.

The edition relates to an intervention devised in the library spaces of ARCH during Henke’s solo exhibition Exploding Plastic Inevitable in June 2025. Alongside ARCH’s existing collection, a temporary section of books was assembled and presented for the duration of the exhibition. Henke invited artists to contribute a publication that had informed their research or practice, forming a collectively curated reading list that mapped the diverse bodies of knowledge shaping contemporary sculptural thinking through accumulation, circulation, and reference. While the library intervention existed only temporarily, the bookends remain as a sculptural echo of the intervention. In this sense, the horse heads act as both functional and conceptual bookends—recalling the provisional curation of the library while framing the exhibition’s engagement with sculpture through reading, research, and collection.

Participating artists included Olga Balema, Ian Cheng, Isabel Cordovil, Rachel Harrison, Lena Henke, Cooper Jacoby, Esther Kläs, Asta Lynge, Isa Melsheimer, Virginia Overton, Julia Phillips, Emil Sandström, Iris Touliatou, Nicole Wermers, Rachel Whiteread, Angharad Williams, Marina Xenofontos, and Bruno Zhu.