Lena Marie Emrich at SAFA

22.06 - 30.06-2025

"The Plunge"

The Plunge unfolds in quiet tension — part shade, part threat. The form holds, as leisure mutates and function slips. The body, quietly omitted. In its Eivissa edition, the new sculptural series of Lena Marie Emrich takes shape through local context and material history. Since 2022, Eivissa has banned colourful parasols from its beaches — a conservation measure to protect native bird species disturbed by vivid designs. The unintended result: thousands of discarded umbrellas now considered waste on an island with limited recycling infrastructure.
In collaboration with Eivissa-based filmmaker, producer, and SAFA founder Iva Fischer Cvjetković, Emrich traced the afterlife of these objects. Together, they interviewed beach vendors, family-run businesses, and individuals navigating economic decline amid the discarded
infrastructure of seasonal leisure. A number of outlawed umbrellas were sourced from storage facilities near one of the island’s iconic beaches.

These found materials were transformed into new iterations of The Plunge — weathered, melancholic umbrellas intersected by steel-like extensions. In this context, the parasol becomes a soft weapon: it evokes the strange territoriality of tourism, where temporary visitors lay claim to space. At the same time, the series reflects on the slow violence of the tourist economy — its impact on ecosystems, aesthetics, and local structures. What begins as an object merge becomes a social sculpture — a quiet protest, a salvaged relic, a question: What remains when leisure ends? Who gets to protect what?

Lena Marie Emrich (born 1991 in Göttingen) Lena Marie Emrich is a sculptor working between Belgium and Germany. Her practice moves fluidly between conceptual research and material precision, often merging sculptural form with fragmentary poetics. Emrich investigates the social and aesthetic roles of rigid objects upgrading them through minimal, yet pointed transformations. Collaboration plays a central role in her process, as does an ongoing interest in systems of value, protection, and presence.

Her work has been shown at Import Export Gallery, Warsaw (2025), Office Impart, Berlin (2024), DS Gallery, Paris (2024), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2019), Kunstverein Göttingen (2020), Kunstraum LLC, New York (2018), and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2021), among others. In 2020, she received the Berlin Masters Award and in 2021/2022 the Art Prize of Kunstverein Hannover. In 2023, she was awarded the Neustart Kultur grant by Stiftung Kunstfonds to realize the project The Darkest Corners in collaboration with Marlene A. Schenk.

Her works are included in several public and private collections, including the Burger Collection, Sprengel Museum, Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation, ADAC Collection, Arndt Collection, and Marval Collection.