At the centre of Miriam Lenk's work stands a female archetype; tall, loud, and powerful, an icon of vitality and power emerging from nature, she is hungry for life, dynamic and flourishing. Naked and liberated, this figure seems intertwined with Eros while being centred in an environment of fertility like a goddess, for this archetype is not depicted in isolation. She is part of an expanding nature, the manifestation of élan vital, a term coined by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, describing the life impulses in all living beings and things, an allness connecting everything to everything. Lenk's female creatures are expressive and surrounded by freely proliferating baroque ornamentation of plants and organic elements. Often they have no face, just a big open mouth with plump lips. Made of ceramic, bronze or epoxy resin, Lenk's first sculpture series still had smooth, evenly modelled surfaces. From 2017 onwards, she began adding traces of plaster, Acrystal and epoxy resin, looking behind the facade of the figureheads both in terms of the physical object as well as content. Questioning the ambivalence of her own perception of women, the sculptor started exploring the negative forms of her sculptures. In the work Fragile Wucht, she goes one step further: tilting backwards, the twisted figure appears baroque and voluptuous from the front. Those who walk around it would only recognise a shell, a sort of afterimage of strength and vitality. Is it the crash that announces itself in the climax?

A trained goldsmith, Miriam Lenk (b. 1975) studied literature and media studies at the University of Konstanz and liberal arts at Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK), where she completed her master's degree in 2009. Since then she has exhibited nationally while also creating sculptures for public spaces, for instance in Albstadt, Ludwigshafen and Berlin. Lenk lives and works in Berlin and Bodman.