Marika Thunder

Info: »It seemed as if the machine could not exist without the man, nor the man without the machine.«

 

Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (1919) describes an outlandish execution apparatus with such obsessive detail that the line between human and machine begins to dissolve. The story is not merely about physical or mental punishment, but about the miscellaneous forms in which institutions shape the body and psyche, making visible the violence of order through a device that is both terrifying and oddly intimate. In Kafka’s vision, the machine becomes more than a tool—it is a living organism, a mirror of human obsession with transformation, control, and endurance. Marika Thunder’s first exhibition at Caprii by Sies + Höke takes up this uncanny space between flesh and metal; and intimacy and institution. Her oil paintings, drawn from photographs of cars and trains found in junkyards, render machines as anthropomorphic forms, corporealities in flux. Just as Kafka’s apparatus inscribes law upon human skin, Thunder’s machines embody the cultural inscriptions left by institutions she’s encountered. Her previous paintings depicting schools, rituals, and social practices such as cotillion ceremonies, Yeshiva, or the fantasies of her childhood celebrity scrapbooks. (…) Location: Caprii, Orangeriestr. 6, 40213 Düsseldorf.