Marlen Tennigkeit's objects look like lovely creatures. The artist encourages such fantasies through her titles: with the names "Nessiflashy" and "Lovelinessy", which are more like pet names than work titles.
Despite all their cuteness, they are in places tightly and tightly laced and are reminiscent of body constructions such as those used by the artist Louise Bourgeois, whose work played a key role in uniting feminist and psychoanalytic themes in art.

Tennigkeit's two works reveal similar allusions, but the cuteness of the first encounter turns into the opposite precisely where the artist's obsessive engagement with the foam used becomes apparent.
Intensively involved with psychoanalytic discourses, she tests the possibilities and limits of unintentional working methods in her work process. Between willingness to accept chance and precision, she creates her objects solely through the act of strength and the immediate physical shaping of the foam, thereby literally conquering the material. She is concerned with staging the material in ever new twists and bends. By exempting this sometimes violent act from tenniness, she also draws attention to the downside of cuteness, which is often denied depth as a projection surface.

- Maria Sitte (published for the exhibition Folds Folding Until Unfolding , 2024) -