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.
That's what pulled me toward figuration — through Hellenistic sculpture, through Caravaggio's dramatic shadows, into the full impossible vocabulary of the human body. Nothing else twists and expresses and betrays itself quite the same way.I paint figures because I have something specific to say. When I only need to clear my mind — when it's just feeling with nowhere to go — it becomes abstract. But when there's a message that needs a body to carry it, I reach for the figure.My work sits against a trend I find genuinely troubling.
The bright, decorative, emotionally uncomplicated art that's everywhere right now — I think it's feeding something dangerous. A numbing. An invitation to feel less, interpret freely, commit to nothing.
Art used to unsettle. It used to criticize and dramatize and hold a mirror to what society would rather not see.
We know entire civilizations through what they painted — the scenes, the bodies, the tensions frozen in pigment.
What will future generations know about us from rooms full of cheerful abstraction?My paintings make people want to write poems. Sometimes they make people look away because they can't hold what's unraveling.
I think that's because the figures already know something the viewer is still working out about themselves. Or chose to bury for comfort.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.