Paula Breuer’s works explore delicate emotional processes of development and the transition between childhood and early adulthood: those formative years in which identities, relationships, and self-images remain in constant flux, and in which one’s wings do not yet seem fully prepared for the world.
Breuer’s starting point lies in observations, lived experiences, dreams and daydreams, as well as fictional narratives and free associations. The artist herself repeatedly appears as a figure within her works, inhabiting shifting roles and states of shame or curiosity, insecurity, disappointment, or longing. Her visual worlds are at once intimate and theatrical. Life unfolds as a kind of staging, a sequence of peculiar scenes in which reality and imagination overlap, marked equally by tenderness and estrangement. Her figures inhabit different roles as if observing themselves in the act of living. In this curious simultaneity of authenticity and performance, the works evoke an absurdist play or a Truman Show-like reality, where the rules of everyday life appear strange and open to question.
This sense of process shapes not only the narratives within the works but also Breuer’s artistic practice. Drawing and painting exist in an open and fluid relationship. Sketches do not merely function as preparatory studies but become autonomous works in their own right. Some are assembled collage-like from disparate image fragments. Motifs, thoughts, and situations overlap and migrate from one plane to another, following a dreamlike logic or the intuitive pathways of associative thinking. The site-specific wall drawings extend this approach into space itself. Appearing like oversized sketches, they resemble the enlarged shadow of an idea for another work, or perhaps its stage set.
Melancholy runs throughout Breuer’s practice, yet her images and figures create a space of refuge for it: a fictional realm in which this emotion can be named, processed, and made visible. Here, melancholy seems at ease; it is neither dramatized nor resolved. Instead, it moves through an emotional landscape shaped by self-irony, longing, and vulnerability. Breuer’s figures are searching, sometimes lost, defiant, or humorous and inhabit those spaces where personal feelings become narratives, akin to digital diaries or a romanticized imagination of failure. It is precisely within this ambiguity that the works achieve their particular intimacy.
Alongside works on paper and canvas, several papier-mâché figures populate the exhibition space. An oversized insect encounters smaller human figures with elongated limbs and adult faces. They recall adolescents who seem already to have outgrown their bodies, yet still do not know what to do with themselves. The insect, meanwhile, functions as an ambiguous cipher. Oscillating between fascination and repulsion, familiarity and otherness, it points toward questions of identity, self-alienation, and belonging. The association with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is, of course, ever present. The human appears as an animal, the animal as a mirror of human states of being. Animals recur in other works as well: grasshoppers, crabs, and other creatures that share humanity’s habitat. Their bodily forms find echoes in Breuer’s figures in those elongated legs, grasping hands, or protective shells.
Wet Wings is concerned with transformation and the uncertainties that accompany it. About the feeling of not yet having arrived, even as transformation is already underway. About the beauty and vulnerability of a moment in which the wings already exist, and only the act of flight remains to come.
text by Verena Osthoff
