Laura Theurich (*1999) lives and works between Dresden, Germany and Copenhagen. Since 2019, she has been studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Dresden, in the class of Alicja Kwade, where she graduated in July 2026. From 2024 to 2025, she studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the sculpture department of Simon Dybbroe Møller.

Working primarily in sculpture, Theurich’s artistic practice examines social constellations, collective agreements, and the structures through which societies organize, regulate, and maintain themselves. Her work explores the underlying fears and power dynamics embedded within these systems, focusing on the mechanisms through which power is exercised, control is established, and individual agency is negotiated. How do structures of power become inscribed in public space and everyday objects? When does protection become a means of surveillance, discipline, or exclusion? And how do mechanisms of control shape our perception of safety, vulnerability, and threat?

Her works emerge from everyday objects that are abstracted and displaced into unfamiliar contexts. She is particularly drawn to glass, a material whose inherent contradictions reflect the ambivalence of power itself. Transparent yet resistant, fragile yet potentially dangerous, glass establishes boundaries that allow visibility while restricting physical access. It exposes and conceals, separates and protects. Within this duality, Theurich investigates how boundaries function as both physical and symbolic instruments of regulation, and how seemingly neutral structures can produce asymmetries of power, enforce distance, and determine what may be seen, accessed, or controlled.

By repositioning familiar objects within altered situations, Theurich disrupts habitual modes of perception and unsettles established visual and social conventions. Her sculptures foreground surfaces, barriers, and spatial relationships, rendering them almost physically tangible. These arrangements evoke moments of suspension in which something appears imminent or has only just been contained. The source of potential danger remains ambiguous: it may reside within the object itself, emerge from the structures surrounding it, or result from the conditions under which it is perceived. Likewise, protection and threat become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Formally restrained and visually precise, Theurich’s works explore the subtle mechanisms through which power and control shape everyday life. They examine how authority is embedded in material structures, how social norms regulate behavior, and how fear reinforces self-discipline. Through the tension between aesthetic clarity and psychological unease, her sculptures reveal the fragile boundaries between protection and restriction, visibility and surveillance, and the ways power becomes normalized and internalized.