This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2025 special issue of Freitag.
A reclining nude from behind. Skin stretched across almost the entire canvas. Only at the lower edge does a fold of pale blue fabric curl up, its creases echoing those of the flesh—the furrow at the shoulder blade and the faint suggestion of ribs. The longer you look at this meticulously rendered oil painting, the more the impression of a whole body splinters into fragments. What you thought you knew so well grows ever stranger—the very thing you’re in, that carries you through life: the body you yourself are.
The painting ›Untitled‹ appears alongside nine other works in Lukas Luzius Leichtle’s solo exhibition ›Eindringling‹, opening during Berlin Art Week at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts.
At just twenty-nine, the painter graduated only last year from Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin, yet he is already represented by Beijing’s White Space gallery and, in 2023, held his first institutional solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Aachen, the city of his birth.
As I stop by to visit Leichtle in his Berlin-Lichtenberg studio, there are still almost two months to go before his Berlin exhibition opens. His workspace sits in a complex of buildings with several entrances, so he greets me with a friendly wave in the courtyard. Inside it is bright, spacious and tidy—strikingly clean. Apart from a few paint tubes, nothing suggests that paint is being worked with here. Six finished paintings for the show hang on the walls: variations on hands, along with two canvases without any body parts at all. Instead they show bathroom tiles. An easel on the table holds the painting he is working on now: a reclining nude from behind.
Leichtle speaks and analyses without prompting. It’s immediately clear how seriously he takes the connection between his painting and the perception of one’s own place in the world. He reflects not only on what it means to be a white man working in oil paint but also on the political relevance of interrogating his own perspective within painting. At present he works six days a week, from morning until evening.
»My first idea is often cheesy,« Leichtle says with a smile. He stands with his arms crossed in front of the wall with three paintings showing close-ups of hands: the texture of fingernails, the pores of the skin, the folds, the cuticle swelling out from the nail bed. »I call this first idea a Magritte idea. I have to break it down.« To simplify this image idea—here, the motif of his own hand—Leichtle first makes sketches. Then he takes photos with his smartphone and uses an app on his iPad to collage an image from these shots: sometimes he cuts out only the fingernail and inserts it into the new picture, sometimes he moves an entire scrap of skin to a place where previously there was only shadow. In this way he builds an image that no longer follows photographic logic but a painterly one.
Control over the body
He explains that at the start of his studies he still painted directly from photographs, but it never gave him the result he wanted. »Photography lets you get away with inconsistencies; painting works differently.« And it’s the rules of painting that interest Leichtle: the assertion of space and depth. »For me it’s about the idea of a hand, not the photographic likeness of one.«
Once he is satisfied with the collage, he sketches the motif again. Leichtle follows this sequence for every painting he makes. He describes himself as a person of control and routine, also in terms of day-to-day living—for instance when it comes to the food he eats. He also admits to being prone to hypochondria. He laughs at himself as he says it, yet it’s clear that this drive for control is not always comfortable.
Before applying multiple layers of transparent oil glazes to the canvas, Leichtle primes it and then rubs away the ground with various tools to achieve the texture he wants: in the hand paintings, for instance, the nails are perfectly smooth while the skin appears porous thanks to the texture of the canvas. On his worktable lie the tools he uses for this—sandpaper, scouring pads, small brushes with stiff bristles, an electric nail grinder, alongside a cuticle remover. »I actually use that for my own manicure,« he laughs. Leichtle always uses his own slender hands, with their long, mannerist-looking fingers, as models. His attention to the materiality of his skin and nails, however, came not from their beauty but from inflammation and cracks caused by the frequent washing after painting. Trying to care for his nails often made the irritation worse, so he had to learn to let go of control—something the artist finds rather difficult. Perhaps his paintings are also a way of regaining control over his own body.
»The longer you look at yourself, the more alien you seem.«—Lukas Luzius Leichtle
Equally striking is the way the materiality of his canvases renders corporeality almost tangible. Leichtle keeps brushwork—the traces of painting, and with them the presence of his own body—to a minimum. Canvas and skin appear one and the same. What is body, what is material? What is one’s own, what is other?
These are questions also addressed by Jean-Luc Nancy in his 1999 essay ›L’Intrus‹ (The Intruder), which gives Leichtle’s exhibition its title. In it, the French philosopher takes the experience of a heart transplant and the ensuing cancer as a starting point for reflecting on the self, the body and otherness. Nancy describes how the failure of his own organ estranged him from his body: »My heart became my stranger: strange precisely because it was inside.« The new heart from another person saved him but at the same time called his self into question. What is one’s own when it no longer functions? Is the other still other when it becomes part of me? And how does the other become self? Looking at Leichtle’s paintings can at times resemble the experience of one’s own body becoming strange.
Leichtle’s paintings, however, never show wounds or open flesh. He achieves intensity without horror. As a »reminder of how it shouldn’t look,« as he puts it, a catalogue of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece lies on the sofa. He admires it, but in his own work he aims to create an effect without blood dripping from wounds. The sight of an ear reddened by falling light, he says, can be enough to see the body at a remove. »The longer you look at yourself, the more alien you seem.« Nails, by contrast with skin, are hard and constantly growing—active boundaries that materialise the edges of the body into the external world.
Leichtle’s depictions of the body are precise, but he dislikes the label hyperrealism. He is less concerned with representing reality than with conveying his own sense of corporeality. And, above all, it is about painting. »I just want to do it,« he says. He wants to exaggerate and play with technique, to »turn colour and light up and down,« to »push« and »rub« the paint until the image outside matches the one inside him. He taught himself technique with YouTube videos—basic courses in painting are increasingly absent from art school curricula. Before studying painting, Leichtle trained in graphic design. He recalls being interested in book design and the guidance of the reader’s eye—which fits: his paintings also work to control the viewer’s gaze. Because in his graphic design courses he always tried to complete every assignment in paint rather than on a computer, he decided to switch to art school before graduating.
»My heart became my stranger: strange precisely because it was inside.«—Jean-Luc Nancy
Finally we move over to the only two paintings in the studio that show no body parts at all—but bathroom tiles. Why paint bathroom tiles? »There’s something accessible about them because everyone knows them, and that is important to me.« He says he talks to his grandmother on the phone every day. She may not have much to do with art, but still he speaks with her about his painting, because it is simply what he does every day. When she heard he was painting tiles, she told him on their next call, slightly worried, that she had inspected her own bathroom tiles and was now wondering how he planned to depict the roughness of the grout in contrast to the smoothness of the tiles. It’s a good question, and it gets to the heart of Leichtle’s engagement with painting: making materiality and volume perceptible and playing with the perception of surfaces. Standing in front of the tile paintings—even though no bodies are pictured—there is nevertheless a sense of corporeality. It is the colour and treatment of the canvas that suggest plasticity and vitality. One work is painted in green tones; the pink of the second recalls skin. The grid created by the grout structures both images. Their larger-than-life scale evokes not only the human body but also the shower itself—an architecture designed precisely for it.
Strangely, even though nothing of the sort is depicted here, when I stand before them, my mind fills with images of crucifixion scenes by Jan van Eyck or Rogier van der Weyden, as if these paintings had formed a body through the volume of paint, absorbing different representations of the body from art history. What’s exciting now is how this young painter might develop his work from here. The tile paintings demonstrate that his approach to depicting the body is so analytical that perhaps no depiction is necessary. This sense of the self that often only becomes fully perceptible once it feels foreign—if, by then, you can still call it the self.
›Lukas Luzius Leichtle: Eindringling‹, CCA—Center for Contemporary Arts, 11 SEP—22 NOV 2025