Lea Terletzki
where myth meets melancholy & light
I fell in love with human eyes first.
The way they hold everything a person is trying not to say, even when the rest of the face has learned to remain perfectly composed. That fascination eventually drew me toward the human figure, through the marble bodies of Hellenistic sculpture and the shadows of Caravaggio, where light seems to reach beneath the skin itself. Nothing else twists and expresses and betrays itself quite the same way. A body can stand perfectly still and somehow confess an entire history.
Perhaps that is why I turn to figuration whenever I have something specific to say. When a feeling simply needs somewhere to go, I let it become abstract. But certain thoughts refuse to exist without a face, a gesture, or a body to carry their weight. They ask to be seen, even when the things they reveal are uncomfortable.Much of my work grows from observing the peculiar ways we contradict ourselves. How we learn to dress old fears in new language, walk the same circle for years and eventually convince ourselves that we have found a different road. I am fascinated by that distance between the stories we tell about ourselves and the quiet evidence our behaviour leaves behind. Mythology has become one of the languages through which I explore it. Its gods and fallen figures may belong to another age, yet I find their struggles almost painfully familiar. Beneath the grandeur of their stories are impulses we still recognise, even if we have become rather skilled at giving them more respectable names.These observations find their way into paintings through layers of oil, acrylic, watercolour, charcoal and whatever material the work seems to demand. Sometimes that means gold, handmade paper or resin. I am drawn to the uneasy coexistence of carefully rendered figures and surfaces that remain visibly imperfect, where a gesture of the brush can disturb something almost sacred in its stillness. Light, too, becomes part of the narrative. At times, a change in illumination reveals details that seemed to have been absent all along.I often think about what art leaves behind of the people who made it. We know entire civilizations through the images they preserved, through their bodies and the conflicts they considered worth remembering.
And I wonder what future generations will make of ours.
We live surrounded by images that pass before our eyes so quickly they scarcely have time to leave a trace.
There is something troubling about how easily we have grown accustomed to looking without really seeing, to consuming an emotion for a moment before moving on to the next.I would rather a painting linger.Perhaps long enough for someone to recognise a part of themselves they had grown accustomed to overlooking. Perhaps long enough to make them uncomfortable.Sometimes I think the figures already know what the viewer is still trying to understand. They are simply waiting for someone to look closely enough.I make art because if I don't, I combust.
If that's not for you. No hard feelings.
If it is. Welcome. Pull up a chair.
Bio
Lea Terletzki is a German figurative painter whose work explores perception:
the distance between how we experience ourselves and how we are seen by others.Her paintings often move through themes of intimacy, vulnerability, power, social roles, memory, identity and the subtle mechanisms through which people observe, define and misunderstand one another. Rather than beginning with a fully resolved image, she often works from an emotion, gesture, colour, sentence or psychological tension and allows the composition to develop through the painting process itself.Her practice combines traditional painting with a background in visual media and an interest in expanding physical artworks through digital and augmented-reality elements.Outside the studio, her interests range from history, old architecture and literature to cinema, music and the collection of beautiful objects she almost certainly did not need.
CV
Lea Henke
Born 2002 in Königs Wusterhausen, Germany
Lives and works in Potsdam, GermanyEducation:
2018–2020 Design Assistant (Gestaltungstechnische Assistenz), Medienschule Babelsberg
Two-year vocational qualification in visual design and media
Focus: visual design, photography, video production, editing, compositing and graphic design.2021–2022 Fachhochschulreife in Design, Medienschule Babelsberg
One-year advanced secondary qualification in visual designProfessional Experience
2025–2026 Gallery Assistant at Galerie Grolman in Berlin, Germany
Contact:
E-Mail
[email protected]
©2026 Lea Henke
All artworks are copyrighted and may not be used, reproduced or modified without permission. Use of my artworks for AI training or datasets is strictly prohibited.