Upcoming
Human Farm
Louise Bourgeois, Andi Fischer, Selma Laura Köran, Sahana Ramakrishnan, Raphaela Vogel
30 OCTOBER – 20 DeCEMBER 2025
Robert Grunenberg is delighted to present the group exhibition “Human Farm” with Louise Bourgeois, Andi Fischer, Selma Laura Köran, Sahana Ramakrishnan & Raphaela Vogel.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS
ANDI FISCHER
SELMA LAURA KÖRAN
SAHANA RAMAKRISHNAN
RAPHAELA VOGEL
Human Farm
30.10.2025 – 20.12.2025
Our relationship with the animal world, as with all non-human life forms, is complex. The question of whether animals and plants exist solely for human use or are autonomous, sentient beings with a soul has occupied humanity since its beginnings. Contemporary art also engages extensively with relationships to non-human life, whether in debates around climate change, posthumanism, colonial history, or new technologies.
We exploit animals and plants industrially. We worship them as deities or protective spirits. We humanize them. They populate myths, fables, art history, comics, children’s books, our dreams, and spiritual traditions. In this context, the exhibition Human Farm investigates the animal as an archetypal motif, as an emotional, spiritual, and mythical counterpart. This is not only about our relationship with “nature” but also with our civilization and with art, which repeatedly reflects itself in the “animal”.
The “Farm of Humans” naturally references Animal Farm, George Orwell’s fable published in 1945 about Stalinism. Orwell’s fable—also readable today in light of contemporary totalitarian and authoritarian developments—uses anthropomorphism (the humanization of animals) as an artistic device to reflect social and political realities and the power of ideologies. At the same time, the title also alludes to the idea that the non-human world, animals with their own consciousness, “look back” at us, revealing that our perspective of dominion over the Earth is subjective and deceptive. Human Farm is thus a reflection of humans seen through the lens of animals, mediated by art.
These motifs are taken up by the artists represented in the exhibition, who also playfully and critically engage with art history. At the same time, some works explore a new, radical ethics of coexistence with all living beings. This draws on animistic, spiritual, and shamanistic worldviews, as well as on the figure of the cyborg, AI, posthumanism, and mythological thinking.
In Raphaela Vogel’s expansive presentation, associations with archaic rituals are combined with elements of horror, subcultural body and music aesthetics, and science fiction. Her Uri sculptures (2018), which align like vertebrae, convey masculinity. They were cast from urinals and, like the four-legged, dog-like creatures O.T. (2024), recall archaic cave drawings and clones of humans, animals, bones, and machines. Above the floor sculptures stretches Ultranackt (2023), a painted collage of animal hides resembling the outline of a tooth, a shamanic membrane expressing existential nakedness and artistic existence. The title references Vogel’s 2018 exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel. It evokes the myth of Apollo and the satyr Marsyas, who challenges the god to a musical contest. Apollo wins and skins Marsyas alive; in his bleeding, total nakedness, Marsyas becomes the epitome of the visionary, Dionysian artist. Vogel appropriates this male-dominated myth.
Her works fuse the aura of latent violence with the emergence of new, resilient, alien life. They create tension between inner and outer, body shell and organic structure. Skin becomes a projection surface, a vulnerable membrane that simultaneously serves as protection, surface, and sign. They merge body, technology, and emotion into an immersive narrative in which the animal, human, and mechanical intersect.
Sahana Ramakrishnan was born in Mumbai and lives and works in New York. Her paintings, which respond to both South Asian and Western painting traditions, are often inhabited by animals, deities, and legendary figures. They are based on extensive travels and research and are inspired by mythology, science, folklore, and storytelling, which, as the artist says, “help us see ourselves in relation to the ‘Other.’” Central to her work is the concept of “kinship,” coined by Donna Haraway, describing the relationship between human and non-human life forms. Ramakrishnan is interested in the gap between humans and other species—the cruelty and curiosity, the anthropomorphism with which we approach the non-human world. Her paintings, such as The Forestallment of Extinction (Flight From the Sun) (2024), which deals with preventing ecological genocide, also function as prayers and invocations. For the exhibition, Ramakrishnan contributes a completely new work on wood dedicated to selkies—mythological beings from Celtic folklore who come ashore as seals and transform into humans by shedding their skins.
In Louise Bourgeois’ series of etchings Topiary: The Art of Improving Nature (1998), trees take on anthropomorphic traits. Trees appear in some of the artist’s earliest works, in which every plant represents “a symbol for a human being.” “It has the right to exist, grow, and reproduce.” The struggle for healing and reconstruction after emotional wounds is a fundamental aspect of Bourgeois’ art. In the series, the female, plant-like body appears amputated or supported by a crutch, leaving open whether the woman takes on the form of nature or vice versa. Bourgeois had an early fascination with animals, growing up with chickens, ducks, dogs, rabbits, and a donkey. Her relationship to the animal world is deeply psychological. To understand her own behavior and relationships, she looked to the animal world. “Identification—the power of identification is very strong” she said. “I lend the animal, I project the animal and shape my feelings.” Give or Take is a series of bronze sculptures representing the opposing concepts of giving and taking, both in human relationships and in the natural cycle of life. Give or Take II (1991) resembles a bird’s claw, perhaps belonging to an eagle or a mythological griffin. The sculptures serve as metaphors for contradictory forces and the complexity of human nature, as well as for existential cycles of life and death, becoming and passing, care and destruction.
The paintings of Berlin-based artist Andi Fischer are populated by quirky birds with human characteristics, exuding absurd humor and melancholy. Fischer’s anthropomorphic, cipher-like painting, reminiscent of child art and self-taught artists, evokes fundamental experiences familiar to everyone: that the world is new, adventurous, and animated. In children’s drawings, there are no hierarchies between humans, animals, plants, architecture, culture, and nature—and neither, seemingly, in Fischer’s works. In his sculptures, the snake appears as a heroine from a children’s book, asleep or in her “home,” into which she doesn’t quite fit but is stuck, like a baguette. Yet this naive idyll is infused with adult knowledge and full of references. The sculptures recall postmodern sculpture, while the paintings reference Informel, Abstract Expressionism, and the gestures of Cy Twombly or late Joan Mitchell. As Boris Pofalla writes, the birds are “our counterpart, our fellow creature, familiar and enigmatic like our neighbors, partners, parents,” while also serving as instruments of painting and cultural critique.
Through her surreal sculptures, multimedia installations, and performances, Selma Laura Köran questions entrenched power structures and gender relations. Köran, of German-Turkish descent, dissects not only bodies but also cultural symbols, ancient temples, and texts. The mythologies she appropriates and deconstructs from a feminist perspective expose the fragile foundations of Western heritage and its projections onto the female body and the “Orient.” The resulting works resemble anarchic, “obscene” archaeological artifacts. This includes the puzzle-like ceramic panels from the series Alternation of Ends (2021–25). With Old Man at the Zoo (2022), Köran targets the ancient iambic poet Semonides, who around 700 BCE wrote the so-called “Jamb of Women”—a collection of misogynistic texts depicting women as “animalistic” beings. Köran turns the tables, presenting super-sexualized, degrading male fantasies as if in a zoo or patriarchal slaughterhouse. In another work, she decodes and tames myth: the male principle, embodied by Uranus as sky and Pegasus as symbol of the sublime, is fragmented, reproduced, and integrated into a modular system. Pegasus, originally singular, is multiplied, cropped, and textured. The sublime loses its freedom and becomes part of a system. Through the title Platzwette, this domestication of the patriarchal is reflected once again—the myth itself becomes an object of order, assessment, and training.
Opening
29 October 2025
6 – 9 PM
Exhibition on view
30.10.2025 – 20.12.2025
For more information, please contact the gallery: mail@robertgrunenberg.com
This exhibition is supported by
