Asta Lynge: Capacity

The Overbeck-Gesellschaft invites you to the opening of Capacity, the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Danish artist Asta Lynge (*1988, Copenhagen). In Lübeck, Lynge will present a major site-specific installation alongside a series of new works that expose the skeletal power structures underpinning objects associated with comfort, stability and value. Frameworks, infrastructures and narratives of progress hold our world together, yet often remain invisible. Such systems absorb weight, give shape and enable processes—but also exert forms of control and restrict certain actions.

In Capacity, Lynge works with recognizable, value-laden objects, such as pearls, sofas and guitars, and through her interventions disrupts and deconstructs their usual functions to the point of crisis. These are objects associated with stability in a conservative or figurative sense. In Lynge’s hands, they are reduced to their most rudimentary forms, and in this way are pushed to the limits of their capacity to hold up—to support or maintain—the underlying rules, expectations and relations that sustain contemporary society. In a world that, according to philosopher Han Byung-Chul “suffers from the compulsion for transparency,” Lynge’s practice articulates its constraints.

Capacity invites the audience to consider their position in relation to these now function-less objects: the sofa stripped to its frame, a guitar without any sound, pearls that cannot be worn. Symbols of comfort, ease and value are revealed for the fragile emblems of power that they have always been, no longer legitimized by use. The objects we encounter in this exhibition exist in a suspended state, held somewhere between being made and being taken apart. Lynge draws attention to the process of creation itself, suggesting we engage with these objects as works in progress, rather than a finished product. They resist completion—not out of failure, but as a deliberate act that reflects the paradoxical state of a world that keeps on producing to maintain the illusion of progress, even as it strains and fractures under all this weight.

Lynge’s sculptures do not offer resolution; instead, they negotiate the tension between the security that stability implies and states of literal and metaphorical exhaustion. They establish a simultaneity of both over- and de-production—revealing our continuous desire for optimization and the crushing reality of structural overload at the same time. 

Curated by Paula Kommoss