Materials and Artistic Process
Felicitas Lensing-Hebben’s artistic practice is best understood as an intuitive rather than conceptual approach to a vast range of materials and stylistic means.
In sculpture, she primarily worked with clay (TonErde) and occasionally cast bronze. Her tactile explorations ranged from delicate fragility to sensuous smoothness and raw, archaic power—always with a pronounced presence in engraving and texture.
As a painter, she applied oil, ink, chalk, and pure pigments onto surfaces such as wood, paper, linen, mulberry bark, and fired clay, using brushes, pens, squeegees, and printing blocks.
Her paintings and sculptures reveal a deep interconnection: The textures of her paintings resonate with the engravings of her sculptures.
For Lensing-Hebben, clay (TonErde) symbolized the act of creation itself. She incised and carved traces of life into its surface before applying layers of colored engobes, frits, porcelain powder, or pure pigments, almost like a garment.
This process unlocked the material’s transformative potential— moving from soft to hard, from amorphous to defined, from malleable to eternal.
Clay embodies all elements: earth shaped by water, dried by air, and fired into form.
In her artistic process, the intuitive flow of perception rose to the surface, manifesting in raw, gestural immediacy.
Artistic Intention
In her early works, Lensing-Hebben explored the dynamic interplay of form and space.
How does space transform form?
How does form shape space?
How do surface and volume interact?
Perspective determined their spatial effect.
Later, her focus shifted toward existential themes—questions of life’s path and the human stance within it:
How does an individual position themselves in life?
How do they relate to others?
How does life relate to them?
How do they move through life?
In her final years, she worked from solid blocks of clay, carving entrances—sometimes resembling doors, sometimes windows—revealing the interior. Eventually, only a few powerful interventions defined the sculptural volume, resulting in a raw, monolithic presence.
This was an assertion of pure force—an energy she sought to affirm at this stage in her life. Expressive power, channeled in spontaneous, intuitive gestures, sometimes resolved in just one or two decisive movements, halted precisely at the moment of completion.
The impact on the material was almost instinctive; the gestural composition only took full form upon contemplation. The energy turned inward, exposing the inner space. Lensing-Hebben aimed to penetrate to the core—excavating interior depth, revealing fissures, and pulling them into the light.
„I want to depict the interior through the exterior,“ she stated in an interview in the summer of 2021.
Her final works distilled this exploration to its essence. Restricting herself to a minimal repertoire of forms and deformations, she no longer reached upward, but delved downward.
Not in grand, spectacular gestures—
but in small, intimate, and profoundly reduced expressions.
Thematically, she had arrived at the core:
the soul.
Awards and Acquisitions
Kunstmuseum Ahlen, Germany
4th Biennial of Small Sculpture, Hilden, 1998
Viktoria Versicherung, Düsseldorf
