Lena Kaapke, born in 1989 in Flensburg, is a young conceptual artist based in Kiel, Germany. She graduated in Fine Art and Ceramics in 2015. After that, she finished a three years research project about “the color red in ceramic technologies.” Since 2015 her work has been shown in many national and international exhibitions. Her work is currently on show at the Arte Laguna Prize in the Arsenale North in Venice (Italy) and in the 62 Premio Faenza exhibition at the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza (Italy).
Kaapke’s work was awarded the Artistic Prize of the State of Schleswig-Holstein (2016), the Ceramics Prize of the Frechener Kulturstiftung (2017), the State Prize of the Professional Association of Plastic and Graphic Arts of Schleswig-Holstein (2019), the Hessian State Prize for German Arts and Crafts (promotion award, 2021), the European honorary of the Europa Union Leverkusen (2021), the BKV Prize for Young Applied Art (2. Prize, 2022), the Vulnerable Art Award of the Diözese Rottenburg (2. Prize) and the Culture Award of the city of Kiel (promotion award). Since this year, she has been represented in the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Her projects connect interdisciplinary questions and topics, which always grow from personal interests, observations, and experiences, which she then likes to explore artistically. Thus, Kaapke’s work is always formed by installation surveys and acquirements. Kaapke’s highly conceptual installations echo the multitude of possibilities offered by traditional ceramic processes while simultaneously questioning the role of ceramics within contemporary art.
Visit Lena Kaapke’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2012-2022
In my artistic work, I open up sensual spaces. My projects combine interdisciplinary questions and topics arising from personal interests, observations and experiences, which I then “explore” and measure artistically. Cartographic explorations emerge. The installation works are translations; they follow a highly conceptual standard defined by me; they show spaces of thought and question them at the same time.
My works are installations, sightings, surveys, and appropriations of contemporary subjective narratives of perception. The works are created through performative and gestural movements, as well as methodical mindfulness. This expresses the desire to understand the medium of ceramics chosen wholistically.
Ceramics as an artistic discipline is of particular concern to me. In my creative work, I search for and try to achieve/apply a conceptually holistic definition of ceramics. I always understood ceramics, one of our oldest cultural products, as the visual materialization of its own manufacturing processes. It carries a history of raw materials, technologies, the manufacturing conditions of time, space and often of everyday stories. Through this materiality, ceramic transports a context, a material iconology that cannot be separated from any ceramic form. At the same time, ceramic material, due to its elaborate and complex manufacturing processes, can only be mastered with manual knowledge and experience. These two dimensions are intrinsic to ceramics; to a certain extent, they determine the perception of the artistic discipline of ceramics, and it is precisely dealing with this that artistically appeals to me. In doing so, I do not wish to turn away from the traditional dimensions of a concept of materiality, but rethink them, consciously reconnect them and question them from a contemporary narrative. In my highly conceptual installations, I try to bring these different dimensions of ceramic materiality together. Thus, my works reflect the possibilities offered by traditional ceramic processes while questioning the role of ceramics in contemporary art. They show the expressive potential of an artistic ceramic discipline in which the boundaries between traditional craft, applied art, and fine art are blurred or added.
I am constantly dealing with the term ceramic paint and its definition and trying to deconstruct/construct ceramic paint artistically.
