Helena Huneke at DREI, Cologne

Der Plan marks the gallery’s first collaboration with the Estate of Helena Huneke (1967–2012) in a solo exhibition. The selection of works traces the artist’s characteristic movement between industrial design, painting, installation, and performance — through two large-scale fabric assemblages, two objects, and a series of small-format drawings and paintings on paper, the dominant medium within the comparatively small oeuvre the artist left behind.

The eponymous work Der Plan (2002) — “something between a drooping rag and a canvas format, similar to Sigmar Polke’s Schimpftuch” — demonstrates “a command of materials and a developed formal language, while making it clear that it is indebted to a post-minimalist legacy — for example, the folded fabrics of Franz Erhard Walther or the transparent ‘rags’ and ‘cloths’ of Eva Hesse”*.

Huneke divided the piece, much like an advent calendar, into 24 numbered sections, some showing monochrome color fields, others containing sewn-in objects and seemingly casually left-behind sewing utensils. Cuts open up views of the reverse side of the fabric, often similarly worked, while glued-on magazine clippings — such as the “spectacular photograph of Jutta Koether from i-D Magazine”* — blend into a draped section along the edge of the work.

The chair object Geschichtenerzähler (Storyteller, 1995) survives as one of two remaining works from the series Vom Besitzen zum Besetzen (From Possessing to Occupying, 1995). The original sixteen sculptures, each based on found chairs, formed Huneke’s graduation exhibition with Ann Wolff at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HfbK).

Surrounding this work, twenty-nine small-format works on paper — created throughout her career up to her death in 2012 — unfold like the pages of a loose diary, offering insight into a practice marked by both material mastery and an intimate fragility, in which thinking and making were inseparable. Phrasal notations such as “Du, verlieben passiert 3× im Jahr” (“You know, falling in love happens three times a year”), “oft geht’s schief” (“it often goes wrong”), “so horny,” or “shit happens” accompany the finely or roughly painted and drawn, abstract or figurative images, often supplemented by additional reflections on their reverse sides.

Born in Münster, Huneke lived and worked in Hamburg and, from the early 2000s, in Berlin. Her practice combined conceptual precision with deep material sensitivity. After graduating in Industrial Design from the HfbK Hamburg in 1995 — with a focus on interior architecture, furniture design, and theory — she developed an approach in which technical mastery and delicate, intimate form were closely intertwined.