Henrike Naumann found expressions of power, personal desire, and political will in the objects of our lives. She was an avid collector of the secondhand—in the sense of used furniture, which features prominently in almost all her work, but also in how rhetoric and belief appear in the design of things we consume, and which we in turn use to represent ourselves.

I doubt I could ever fully follow Henrike’s extended scavenger hunt for the intricacies of political extremism in her home of Germany, but when we worked together on her first US exhibition—“Re-Education” at SculptureCenter in New York in 2022—she went straight to the top. She wanted to understand the clash of aesthetic orders that she had witnessed through imagery of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. She identified an affected rustic sensibility, and she diagnosed a fraught pursuit of affirmation by history and by overtures to prehistory. The SculptureCenter show produced a monumental wall of Federal-style office furniture, craned into a mass resembling the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., set in juxtaposition to a Flintstonian mancave and a group of chairs arranged according to the potential ideological subtexts of their designs. On one wall, she spelled “Radical Centrist” in relief—a position her work suggested was polite cover for an international rightward tilt—and decorated it with pale curtains.