Bartha_contemporary is delighted to present the first solo exhibition by Annika Thiems (b. 1991), entitled On wings (or almost), on view from March 5 to April 5 2026. Conceived in response to Méret Oppenheim’s print series Parapapillonneries (1976), the exhibition unfolds as an inquiry into absurdity, surrealism, and psychoanalytic thought. The new sculptures gesture toward the repressed: futile attempts at containment and order, like an insect evading the pin.

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Working across textile sculpture and installation, Thiems creates soft structures that hover between utility and excess, tenderness and restraint; objects that appear to have devised their own coping mechanisms. The works feel simultaneously over-prepared and yielding, suspended between protection and exposure.
Drawing on her background in psychology, Thiems employs free association and a surrealist language to engage with found and antique materials. Discarded fabrics, wooden containers, and domestic objects are treated as carriers of memory, shame, and longing. Upholstery techniques—learned in her family’s furniture workshop—serve as an inherited vocabulary for the pre-verbal and unconscious. Thiems resists fixed interpretation, allowing sensuality, dream logic, and the grotesque to unfold without explanation.

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Fifty years after the publication of Parapapillonneries, this response echoes the butterflies’ refusal of prettiness and coherence, their insistence on individuality and contradiction. Oppenheim’s radical legacy—her rejection of expectation, discipline, and obedience—forms a critical lineage for Thiems’s practice. In this space, the psyche is not something to be decoded but encountered: messy, unpredictable, and perpetually volatile.

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German artist Annika Thiems lives and works in London. Her work has been presented internationally across visual art and performance contexts, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain, and has recently been featured in The World of Interiors.