Lena Henke

Bortolami is pleased to present The City Transformed, an exhibition of works by Lena Henke and the artist's third exhibition with the gallery.

The City Transformed unfolds across ten individual leather-covered panels, collectively forming a larger composition: a fragmented geography of Manhattan. The city's iconic street grid and architectural logic have been burnt into the leather surface, overlaid with text drawn from live recordings of lectures—from a series entitled The City Transformed—by the late architectural historian Barry Lewis. These new works echo the city's own cycles of fragmentation, commodification, and dispersion. In doing so, Henke revisits the history of mapmaking—when territories were sketched onto leather or parchment—and entwines it with present-day systems of urban extraction. The grid becomes a torso; the map becomes muscle. The city emerges not as a static entity but as a living surface—layered with memory and desire.

Henke's sculptures return yet again to the horse: the artist's recurring motif for psychosexual mapping and urban mythology. A large amorphous aluminum sculpture floats midair, somewhere between human and animal. Equestrian limbs, saddles, and sex toys fuse with architectural fragments and traces of topography, producing a new surreal bodily terrain. An original oak subway bench from Union Square Station occupies an ambivalent space between functional and sculptural installation, acting as both prop and participant, resonating with the historical textures Henke draws upon: objects in circulation, signs of civic use, body and infrastructure entwined.