TÊTE-À-TÊTE by Lena Marie Emrich at Salon by IMPORT EXPORT

 

IMPORT EXPORT is pleased to announce the opening of “TÊTE-À-TÊTE”, the new solo exhibition by Lena Marie Emrich at Salon by IMPORT EXPORT in London.

Lena Marie Emrich is a Brussels and Berlin-based sculptor whose work centers around the symbiosis of sculptural and fragmentary poetry. Having graduated from Weissensee
Academy of Art Berlin and Mirosław Bałka’s class at Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Emrich emerges from a conceptual and Minimalist lineage, which she reconfigures through a poetic and sensorial lens.In her practice, she focuses on theory-based material development while exploring the dichotomy between industrial and artisanal craftsmanship. Working in series, she creates visually enthralling, sensuous relational art and design objects that foster temporal and spatial human exchange: slick yet playful love seats and coffee tables, glossy airplane trays, flickering airplane windows, elegant terrazzo tram handles, prismatic Murano glass pissotte (the pissing corners of Venice). Emrich examines these objects for their aesthetic, linguistic and social relevance while giving them a material and semiotic upgrade through engraving poems and drawings.

 

“TÊTE-À-TÊTE” is a pocket exhibition comprising several of Emrich’s creations from
2023 - 2026, with her signature Gossip Chair (Lingerie Drop Bench) being the focal
point of the presentation. These love seats – existing in a variety of materials and colours, in versions for two or three people – have previously been shown in the context of exhibitions, biennials and theatre productions. Thanks to their interactive properties, Emrich’s tender objects create an environment akin to a stage waiting to be played.

As per the words of Emrich’s friend and novelist Jovana Reisinger: ‘It is interesting to note that divulging secrets, speaking specifically about people who are (not) present, spreading rumors or deliberately false circumstances are diametrically opposed to love-filled, tender devotion – and yet can be carried out wonderfully in the same place. The love or accordingly gossip chair, needs intimacy – it can only fulfill its purpose when two people take a seat on it, engage in the closeness enforced by its construction and accordingly enter into dialogue (in whatever form). Which direction the discourse takes and which tone the protagonists adopt is left up to them. (...)’

 

Presented alongside Emrich’s elevated everyday objects (Lingerie Drop Bench and Coffee Table, Murano glass pissotto Ramus, Disapp mirror and the poetry-engraved vintage glasses) is a white relief in acrylic stone – an homage to the late Minimalist Charlotte Posenenske and her diary note from 29.11.1966. Similarly to Posenenske, Emrich looks to performance and choreography as a tool to change the course of social interaction. On the evening of 14 January, as part of “TÊTE-À-TÊTE” opening, the Lingerie Drop Bench was activated by performer Lene Vollhardt. Encouraged by Emrich – who frequently works on stage design and costumes for theatre – Vollhardt entered into her personal dialogue with the work by assuming six seated poses and creating ‘a network of glacial whispers that stabilize into a story’.

 

“TÊTE-À-TÊTE” is Emrich’s second exhibition with the gallery after "Holding Tight", a collaboration with the Estate of Charlotte Posenenske and Galerie Mehdi Choukari presented at IMPORT EXPORT, Warsaw, last year.