Benjamin Weil:

Among Beings 

Among Beings is the title chosen by Susanne S. D. Themlitz for a collection of twenty-six new works she has brought together in a grey archival box. They invoke all the hybrid creatures that inhabit her work, whose form and essence are shaped by the assemblage of various unrelated elements: uncanny fragments of architecture or furniture become the bodies of animals, identified by heads made of latex masks; empty clothes topped with terracotta faces recall ghostly human figures; found objects are combined with bronze elements crafted by the artist; and human faces sometimes also appear in the middle of a brushstroke while others are the result of bringing together magazine cutouts.  

This diverse community of beings congregates in two and three-dimensional poetic and surreal landscapes she articulates in a similar fashion, whether on a canvas, a piece of paper, or in the space of the exhibition; mixing and collaging drawings, paintings, found objects and sculpture. She combines elements that are clearly not related in scale, resulting in distortions that seems to question the very notion of perspective as a hierarchic order. In that sense, there is something almost medieval in her compositions.

Susanne S. D. Themlitz entices us – the viewers – to mingle or interact with her brainchildren-characters who people the exhibition spaces, suggesting we may all become part of the same community while in the same space. Thus, she calls for a reassessment of the established rules that predicate our relationship with the different non-human life forms, some bluntly ignore or merely consider as elements in a landscape, as adornment. She also stresses the importance of coming together to share a common experience, as we increasingly tend to retrench behind screens, and seldom congregate. 

This collection of pieces maps out Themlitz’s mental landscape: drawings, altered photographs and collages reveal her working process and exemplify the body of work in two and three dimensions she has produced over the past three decades. This box could therefore be regarded as a glossary of themes and forms that have structured her work, mixing references to animals, humans, plants, inanimate objects or abstract forms, and the way they form a whole. While most works in this compilation are facsimiles, Themlitz also chose to insert “real” drawings, thereby questioning the importance of original versus copy.

This “Grey Box” belongs to a historical lineage started in 1934 by Marcel Duchamp, when he decided to compile facsimiles of documents, notes and drawings relating to The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), 1915–23. Releasing these sets as a limited edition presented in green archival boxes, he established a new art form that would later inspire many artists. Upon further thought, one could also relate Among Beings to Duchamp’s “Boîte en valise” (1935-41), a selection of his most famous works, produced as small-scale replicas to fit in a travel case. This “portable” version of a Susanne S. D. Themlitz survey exhibition is released after The Language of Silent Things, a show she presented at Marco in late 2024 until early 2025. Hence, this boxed set of works could almost function as an epilogue to this show, or perhaps, as a prologue to a forthcoming project developed concomitantly, to be shown at the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon in the Spring of 2026.

The portability of Among Beings also evokes a pocket book, designed to provide access to essential literature in a practical format, enabling one to read anywhere and in all circumstances. One could imagine packing that box to always move around with an essential collection of artworks. While the archival box refers more to storage and implies its opening to pull out and display the content, Themlitz has elected to fit it with a transparent lid. This enables the showcasing of one work at a time: the box becomes a vitrine, envisioned as a portable “Wunderkammer” (cabinet of curiosities) of sorts.