LEA GREBE

Lea Grebe (* 1987, lives and works in Munich) studied art education, art history and modern German literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Between 2012 and 2018, she studied painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and has been working there as an artistic collaborator since 2017. In 2020/21 she received, among others, the Debutante Grant of the City of Nuremberg, the working grant of the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the grant of the Freistaat Bayern for Cité internationale des arts Paris. Her works are regularly shown in group exhibitions throughout Germany, for example in the exhibitions Flügelschlag at Museum Sinclair-Haus (2019), RESET at Kunstmuseum Ahlen (2021/22), and Das Insekt – zu Darstellung in (Zeichen-)Kunst und Wissenschaft at Kunsthalle Mannheim (2023), as well as at the Biennale Lindau In situ Paradise (2022). Furthermore in 2020, the catalogue Holometabolie – Lea Grebe was published by Hatje Cantz Berlin. Her works can be found in numerous private collections and in the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany.

“Of bodies changed to other forms I tell.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 1)
Lea Grebe’s art deals with the observation of nature at the intersections of science and technology. Based on the artist’s personal archive of insects found dead, which was built over the last couple of years, a wide variety of questions for new works emerges. For her, the class of insects is exemplary of the creatures that surround us and the ecosystems they animate. Insects reflect and analyse man’s interest in the orders imposed by nature. Her small bronze sculptures of individual animals and plants refer to a reprocessing of nature that transforms living flora and fauna into relics of conservation and musealisation. In series, her drawings investigate visual patterns and processes as they can be observed in swarms, groups and herds. In these paper landscapes, apparent creatures move between colour and obstacles, creating structures, condensations and patterns that remind the viewer of a variety of natural and everyday phenomena.

Fascinated by collaborative interactions between animals and plants (for example plant galls, cocoons, mimicry in plants and animals, evolutionary adaptation of plants), Lea Grebe conceives works that examine these symbioses between animals and nature as models for human behaviour. Central to her work is the concept of transformation, a state that harbours the possibility and hope of change. For her, however, it is also “about the search for new ecological empathic ways of thinking. The aim is to imagine a world view that is not human-centred. The aim is to promote a perception that is not only focused on oneself, but also on the other, the counterpart and also the alien.”