by Olivia Noss // May 29, 2025
‘Grace of Desire’ is a rich visual survey aimed at highlighting works of queer artists from the surrealist and avant-garde movements of the early 20th century to the present day. The exhibition forms part of a three-part series titled ‘Lesbian Legacies.’ For the show, Lorenz Liebig and Tarik Kentouche of Scherben have partnered with curator and queer historian Birgit Bosold to compile a collection of works that celebrate and honor lesbian artists, while revealing unique and rebellious contributions to these artistic movements.
‘Lesbian Legacies #1 Grace of Desire,’ exhibition view, Scherben Berlin 2025 // Courtesy: Scherben, copyright Max Eulitz VG Bild-Kunst
Entering the exhibition space, Krista Beinstein’s large-scale portraits confront visitors almost instantly. Beinstein’s images depict figures donning latex masks and gloves, adopting aesthetics from S and M culture. The photographer uses inflatable body augmentations to exaggerate her subjects’ curves, making them virtually unrecognizable. Beinstein incorporates prosthetic female and male genitalia, titles including “Klitoride Extravaganz,” translating from German to “Clitoral Extravagance.” This tongue-in-cheek approach to photography as well as gender fluidity was largely unprecedented at its time, and continued to remain a playful contribution to sexual liberation movements during the 90s and into the early 2000s.
Krista Beinstein: ‘Prothesia 1 aus Klitoride Extravaganz,’ 2004, installation view, ‘Lesbian Legacies #1 Grace of Desire,’ Berlin 2025 // Courtesy of the artist and Scherben, copyright Max Eulitz VG Bild-Kunst
The following images in the show feature works of gender fluid artist Claude Cahun. Fittingly so, as the artist is largely known for their use of self-portraiture to question gender binaries. Turning the camera on themselves, they depict their head trapped within a glass orb, each time addressing the camera with a uniquely opaque expression. When interacting with these four self-portraits, one forgets the body attached to the artist, and is left simply with the hybrid form they take on.
Claude Cahun: ‘Keepsake 1 (Faksimile),’ 1939, in ‘Lesbian Legacies #1 Grace of Desire,’ Berlin 2025 // Courtesy of KJersey Heritage Museum, copyright Max Eulitz VG Bild-Kunst
As the exhibition continues, the works venture further back in time, taking on more classical approaches to surrealist aesthetics. Using mirrors and slow camera shutter speeds as distorting devices, photographers Florence Henri and Marta Hoepffner deftly compose still life images from everyday objects. Both artists construct arrangements that disorient and turn photographic still lifes and landscapes into what one could only call dreamscapes.
Florence Henri: ‘o.T.,’ 1929, in ‘Lesbian Legacies #1 Grace of Desire,’ Berlin 2025 // Courtesy of Frac ile-de-france, Archive Florence Henri, Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Scherben, copyright Max Eulitz VG Bild-Kunst
‘Grace of Desire’ concludes with Marta Hoepffner’s female nudes, a classic genre within photography yet, up until then, a subject matter produced almost exclusively for and by men. For one of her nude portraits, Hoepffner uses solarization—a photographic process largely used in surrealist techniques, where light exposes a print during its developing process in the darkroom. The resulting image gives her subject with alien quality, abstracting the body even further by depicting luminous greys in place of whites within the highlights of her image.
Marta Hoepffner: ‘Akt, 1939 (?),’ in ‘Lesbian Legacies #1 Grace of Desire,’ Berlin 2025 // Courtesy of Kressbronn Museum Lände, copyright Max Eulitz VG Bild-Kunst
What unites these images, beyond the demographic of the artists who made them, is their insistence that photography proposes new modes of existing in the world. In this exhibition, Beinstein, Cahun, Henri and Hoepffner leverage photography as a tool for self-determination. Their photographs, regardless of subject matter, are assertions of who they are—their aesthetic sensibilities as inseparable from their identities and, in turn, their ways of moving through the world. In times where others attempt to define who one might be, photography continues to provide an outlet for dispelling such claims. These images serve as evidence of the fact that a camera, if wielded intentionally, allows for self-definition, and perhaps even self-actualization.
Exhibition Info
Scherben
Group Show: ‘Grace of Desire’
Exhibition: May 1-June 8, 2025
scherben.in
Leipziger Str. 61, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
