High Noon

Sofia Defino Leiby’s exhibition High Noon at Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft marks the culmination of her five-month residency as the Marianne-Defet-Malerei-Stipendium Fellow. Her first institutional solo exhibition, it reflects a sustained interest in (digital) surfaces, artistic styles, corporate identities, and architecture. Alongside paintings and plein-air watercolors, the exhibition also explores forms of screen-based perception, expanding the traditional scope of landscape painting into a hybrid virtual space of memory, fiction, and simulation.

Leiby’s practice draws from sources including her archive of advertisements, photographs, fabrics, newspapers, screen prints, and previous works, as well as collaborations with artist friends. All elements are democratically examined for inclusion in her evolving material cosmos, appearing as traces or fragments in her paintings, collages, and digital compositions.

The exhibition title High Noon refers to the apex of the summer solstice – noon on the hottest day of the year, during one of the hottest years in history. It also symbolizes confrontation or climax. In response, Leiby visually articulates states of emotional overload, self-preservation, and desire for escapism. In her exhibition at Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft, she translates overlapping emotional and cultural conditions – grief, anger, political agitation, withdrawal – into a visual language that addresses contemporary phenomena such as cocooning, hope-core, immersive gaming, and excessive screentime. Leiby explores dissociation as one possible reaction. The results of this investigation range from seemingly casual acts of appropriation to meticulously crafted, labor-intensive works.

Included in the exhibition are a group of watercolors painted plein air during a rainy trip to Oostende in Belgium, which translate seascapes into gentle images made while sitting in the dunes; these bear evidence of both close observation of the scene and the experience of being exposed to nature while drawing. Strand Oostende, 26 June, 12:38 PM (2025) carries traces of raindrops that have faded into circular stains. Also shown in the exhibition are virtual photographs which extend the notion of landscape by depicting 3D-modelled worlds. Both can signal methods of retreat and raise questions about how our modes of seeing differ between physical and mediated environments.

In her painting practice, Leiby begins by arranging different materials before transferring them to wood panels or canvas. The paintings on view emphasize physicality and texture over flatness. The back-and-forth process leaves visible traces of its making: smudges, imprints, adhesive residues, and fragments of earlier decisions, as in Untitled (Pearls) (2025).

Erasure plays a central role and becomes an almost additive act in the paintings. In works like Alles wie Immer (2025), figures sometimes appear in various conditions of opacity, collaged behind patterned paper or next to pieces of fabric loosely applied to the surface.

Her painterly decisions also mirror the glitches and layering in her earlier digital compositions, reinforcing a conceptual overlap between analogue and virtual modes. Leiby has long been interested in first-person video games such as Silent Hill and D2 (both 1999) for their moods, atmospheres, and interplay of text and image. During her time in Nuremberg, she commissioned designers to build virtual environments using Unity and Unreal Engine, including a recreation of her studio at Atelier- und Gaeriehaus Defet in Nuremberg (Terrasse, 20 August, 11:26 AM [2025]). Rather than goal-oriented games, these are navigable settings made only for the artist herself to explore. In this series, viewers encounter them only through a series of “virtual photographs,” an emerging term describing fabrication or capture of images in digital realities. Leiby’s images serve as portals into fictional worlds, always from the artist’s point of view.

A publication accompanying the exhibition documents the works on view and presents materials that informed Leiby’s practice during her residency in Nuremberg. It includes an introduction by Nele Kaczmarek, exhibition texts by Otto Bonnen and Leonie Schmiese, and prose contributions from Michael Van den Abeele, Zuzanna Bartoszek, Nelson Beer, and Andrew Wagner.

Exhibition text by Kunstverein Nürnberg Director Nele Kaczmarek and Curator Leonie Schmiese