Milena Naef

Milena Naef (b.1990, Switzerland) is a visual artist—born into a lineage of stone cutters—who has reinterpreted her family's tradition in performance‐based works using her body as another material. Naef is “fascinated by the thought that our bodies stand in a constant 'choreography' with their environment.”

Recent solo and group exhibitions include Plots and Pieces at DOCK, Basel, Switzerland (2023); Avoiding the Void at art@work (ti&m), Frankfurt, Germany, Zurich, Bern, Switzerland (2022); MARBLE, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark (2022); JUNGKUNST, Winterthur, Switzerland (2021); and One eye and two takes on vulnerability with Matea Bakula at Lumen Travo Gallery, Amsterdam (2020). Naef is the recipient of the Frans de Wit Prijs (2019), the Sybren Hellinga Art Prize (2016), and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Award in Autonomous Art (2016).

For Ground/work 2025, Milena Naef sculpted Three Times Spanning, two adjoining pieces of marble with negative spaces for a fallen tree in the Clark's pasture and for her own body—the latter a subtle trace of her fleeting presence.