Britta Thie’s works explore the treacherous geographies created by the endless flow of highly stylised and commodified images that define contemporary visual culture. Her increasingly renowned video and multimedia works, including the webseries Translantics (co-produced by ARTE and Schirn Kunsthalle), consider not only the ways in which such images are produced, but also how they are consumed.
In her video works, Thie (mis)appropriates the artifice and idioms of contemporary popular visual culture, including scripted reality television, situation comedy, commercial clips, and art films. Applying a flattening effect mirroring that produced by social media’s permanent stream of unrelated, often clashing images, Thie’s works dissolve the gossamer membranes between visual genres, as well as those presumed to demarcate the worlds of art, fashion and consumerism. For instance, the 2 channel video installation Shooting - Arrogant Suffering Thie deflates the glamour, extravagance, and raw power dynamics of the modelling photoshoot by means of a stark and laconic visual vocabulary. Translantics reconstructs the habitus of the digital native generation, and posing questions about how self-definition, affect, and manners have been altered over two decades of omnipresent digital culture.
As a filmmaker, actress, and former model, the artist also has found herself on many film sets throughout her life. The means of atmospheric production are centre-stage in Thie’s new painting series titled More Atmosphere!. While filming a television series in Budapest, Thie began to consider the objects that surrounded her while she waited for her scenes. Such objects provide the irreducible - crucially invisible - internal architecture of moving image production in popular entertainment. This paradox of ‘present absence’ became a fulcrum for larger questions the artist has sought to pose about the invisibilisation of various forms of (often gendered and racialised) labour, as well as the deceptive power of narrative, and the ways in which minds and objects interact. Thie came to think of the objects she saw on set as companions of a kind, familiar presences with whom she began to feel a sense of kinship. To Thie, they were not human, exactly, but they had their own personalities. The works in this series serve as a kind of portrait gallery of these inanimate ‘characters’. Thie’s photo-realistic images gesture toward the high-resolution visuals expected of contemporary television and cinema, wherein HD imagery is deployed to connote ‘reality’, all the while shaping the visual culture beyond the screen.
The works in More Atmosphere! are not simply still-lifes. They are depictions of a form of continuous observation, a portrait of the obscured protagonists in a social and economic ecology.
Britta Thie was born in 1987 in Minden. She studied at Kunstakademie Münster, the Cooper Union in New York, and graduated from the Universität der Künste Berlin. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Thie's recent institutional solo shows include “In Development” at Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany. In 2023, she was part of the group exhibitions “Identity not Proven” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and “How (Not) to Fit In – Metaphors of Adolescence” at Villa Merkel in Esslingen (both in Germany).
She has presented her work in the following institutions: Public Art Fund, New York, US | MOCA, Toronto, CA | Mumok, Vienna, AT | Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, DE | Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, DE | KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, DE | Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, DE | Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, DE | Kunstverein Göttingen, DE | Anthology Film Archives, New York, US | Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, DE | Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, DE | Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, DE | Villa Merkel, Esslingen, DE | Kunsthalle Osnabrück, DE | National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, DK | Kunstverein Wiesbaden, DE | Fragile, Berlin, DE.
Thie's works are part of the following collections: Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin, DE | The Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Bonn, DE | Public Collection of Museumsverein Mönchengladbach, DE | Collection Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Vestfossen, NOR | Collection Catharina Svanborg, Malmö, SE | Collection Trevor McFedries, Miami, US | Collection Eva Gödel, Tomorrow is Another Day, Düsseldorf, DE | JPH Collection, Munich, DE.
