Artist: Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri

Bluerider ART London · Mayfair presents the UK Solo Exhibition Debut of Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri. Titled ‘The Second Skin’. Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri (Norway, b. 1975) graduated in Fashion Design from the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo. Moving beyond the stereotype of Norwegian minimalism, she channels a distinctly Nordic temperament – melancholic, cool, and incisive – transforming garment-making into a profound artistic language. Working with discarded clothing, fabric scraps, and textile remnants, Bahri dismantles, stitches, and reconstructs fragments from chaos, granting them renewed imagery and meaning. Through her signature use of neutral-toned textile art, she probes the collective conditions of contemporary society – restriction, expectation, order, and isolation – shaping a practice that is immediately recognizable. Her works have been exhibited at Kunstmuseet NordTrøndelag (Norway) and Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, the Socle du Monde Biennale (Denmark), and are in the permanent collections of Kongsberg Municipality and Den Norske Husflidforening.

The exhibition title 'The Second Skin', precisely articulates the core of Bahri’s practice. In sociological terms, clothing is the ‘second skin’ of humanity. It does not merely cover the body; it becomes the first calling card through which an individual enters the social system, carrying expectations and restrictions imposed from the outside. Yet this second skin is often also the very source of limitation and isolation. Bahri’s artistic method is a sustained deconstruction of this second skin. She tears open the polished surface of social disguise, using the chaos of found materials – the discarded, the flawed, the decaying – to expose the truthful interior states beneath. With thread as her drawing instrument, she offers viewers a vantage point beyond the loops of the self, igniting an inner dialogue: Who was I? Who will I become? Who could I be? What unfolds is a process of reflection, recognition, and negotiation – an attempt to craft singular life narratives in the tension between a body that feels confined and the norms that shape society.