London
This intimate, untitled exhibition (on view through December 16, 2025) is the first U.K. presentation devoted to the work of German artist Irma Hünerfauth (1907–98) since “IRMAnipulations” at the Goethe-Institut London in 1983. Featuring just five of Hünerfauth’s Vibrationsobjekte (Vibration Objects) and Sprechende Kästen (Speaking Boxes), as well as two works on canvas, the spare curation navigates the artist’s development with economy and flair.
Hünerfauth’s early works on canvas, such as the two paintings included here—Helle Felder (Bright Arrays) (1959–60) and Untitled (1960)—arose from a body of work intended as a commentary on life after the Nazi regime, in line with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Franz Roh. Hünerfauth soon found these abstract canvases unsatisfactory, however, and turned to the potential of discarded materials, scrap metal, and fragments of consumer products to better capture and critique the social and political conditions of the late 1960s/early ‘70s. After completing a welding apprenticeship in collaboration with her husband, the engineer and amateur inventor Franz Führer-Wolkenstein, Hünerfauth co-founded the artist group Gruppe K and began to create her first Vibration Objects.
Tall and top heavy, these unsettling kinetic sculptures poise almost precariously on leggy steel plinths. Two early examples—Spiegelobjekt (Mirror object) (c.1971) and Regen (Rain) (1971)—create self-contained worlds on an approximately human scale from found objects, circuit boards, Perspex, steel, and chrome. Their internal compositions, seen through Perspex boxes, appear chaotic, even random, yet when a viewer accepts the invitation to press the button, and the work comes to life, a kind of logic emerges from the chaos as the entire structure begins to vibrate. Disrupted and destabilized, as if on the brink of disintegration, these worlds are no longer held in their strange equilibrium but opened into present time and space. The objects tremble in their entirety, as glass rods clink, steel springs creak, and fine metal wires sway as if blown by the wind, or buffeted by the fortunes and misfortunes of life. More than 50 years on, these works remain unsettling in their power to evoke the basic instability that underlies human societies and a present-day political climate that increasingly produces waste and makes war.
Hünerfauth soon began to incorporate spoken word and other overlaid sound elements in her Speaking Boxes, such as Kreig—auch Tiere leiden (War, animals suffer, too) (1981). In this haunting example, a broken toy lamb is half buried in soil within a Perspex box. The upper surface of the box is richly populated with a dense tangle of green wires that extend downward into the soil and upward into the air, each ending in a small, button-like object or other broken electrical component. An amplifier below plays a short soundtrack, layering voice, the noise of exploding bombs, and other sounds. It is a chilling scenario that resonates entirely with contemporary life.
While Hünerfauth struggled with the social and political conditions of post-Nazi Germany, she also attempted to understand rising pressures on perception, community, and nature in the face of technological advancement. If her Vibration Objects and Speaking Boxes have anything to say about today’s relentless changes and stresses, technological and otherwise, it is surely as she herself set out in her “game instructions” for engagement: “Breathe deeply, play yourself free. Simply be yourself.”
