Elena Helfrecht - Plexus - 2023

Description from the seller
This item ships from the EU. I CANNOT SHIP TO AMERICA until Trump's Tariffs are shut down.

Once payment is made, I must ship the item within three days.

I cannot hold and combine outside of those parameters.

I will do my best to combine orders within that. I can ONLY SHIP TO THE ADDRESS PROVIDED ON CATAWIKI. If you have two addresses, please manage your address before buying.

All this aside, I very much appreciate selling you books from my collection and hope they find a good home.


Following the death of her grandmother, artist Elena Helfrecht embarked on a photographic journey through her family’s estate in Bavaria. Employing the interiors, objects and archives, she began to explore the ideas of inherited trauma and postmemory—the relationship following generations have to the traumas of those who came before.

In her black and white photographs, Helfrecht uses the house and its contents to stage an allegorical play. The interiors and still lifes, which at first glance appear to show mundane objects and scenes, become increasingly unsettling: stalactite-like deposits drip sideways from walls, dark chasms open up beneath the floor boards, a snake coils around a dolls’ house and chairs hang from the beams. As the narrative progresses, motifs of eggs, birds and fleshy growths (a nod to the title, ‘Plexus’—a network of nerves or vessels) are interwoven with archival family photographs, hinting at links and connections between inscrutable symbols, people and places.