Like her contemporaries Leonora Carrington and Louise Bourgeois, Oppenheim uses the cultural moment of surrealism to direct our attention toward a world of things as they really exist: non-physical entities unaffected by human error and "progress."

In this sense Oppenheim's work defined the era through its "unspecified power," which is opened up in the analysis of Celia Rabinovitch: "the pervasive sense of significance–the mysterious attraction and fear that is the numinous or the holy–...the most striking feature of surrealist art."

Prefiguring facets of Pop Art, Oppenheim's "surreal material fetishism...was especially effective: her fur-covered breakfast china of 1936, her demon with animal head of 1961, her dress and furniture designs (e.g., the table with bird legs, 1939)." Valie Export links Oppenheim's interest in "fauna symbolism" to the work of Carolee Schneemann and herself. Biographically, the use of the wild animal is linked to Oppenheim's namesake. Born in prewar Berlin to a German-Jewish father and a Swiss mother, Oppenheim's parents named her after Meretlein, the forest-dwelling child sorcerer in Der grüne Heinrich by the Swiss author Gottfried Keller. A common theme in sorcery, witchcraft and theurgy as depicted in sources of antiquity is the use of apparently mundane objects, especially from animals and plants. Another understanding of witchcraft is that it threatens, confuses, scrambles and/or destroys the spiritual authority of dominant powers by the use of small objects or "fetishes" used in innovative and unauthorized ways. Oppenheim used the insights of Marx regarding the fetish of the commodity and Freud regarding the psychological fetish to draw upon the "unspecified power" of the animal to make the gallery environment part of nature, or to denature the natural by introducing it to the gallery. The undecidability of her work is part of its creative power.