I first met Sofia Defino Leiby pre-pandemic, on a bus as part of a crowd, and she mentioned that she was studying under Amy Sillman. In 2023, we ran into each other again at a friend’s birthday at Gorgonzola Club. She told me about combing the vintage shops of Neukölln for a wedding-guest dress ahead of a friend’s New York City ceremony the following week. Later that summer, at Sale e Tabacchi — another Italian haunt — I finally encountered Leiby’s visceral irony as she read excerpts from her 2023 book May Text,1 while Courtesy spun a DJ set for a small audience in petit comité.

The reading went like this:

Me and my own hair. As company.
I sweep it off the floor. Collect it.
Falling falling too much.
I became obsessed with egg-shaped things.
Egg shaped candies, egg shaped candles ( similar )
Mavis Gallant said in When We Were Nearly Young that she went to another country so she could find her outline against a background.
But that she just instead faded into the background.
I want to get rid of the ‹I› because the author died, it’s said, a long time ago already2.

A foundational aspect that leaps out when you encounter Leiby’s work is its deeply personal source material, which may echo the popular literary genre of autofiction. Yet, although Leiby begins with her most intimate experiences, she insists that she stays at a decent remove and keeps the reader squarely in mind. As she puts it, her words “don’t always correspond to real events.” For her, the cadence of the text — short sentences with purposeful breaks, pauses, and a precise order — often outweighs strict empirical truth.

Leiby’s practice departs from her lived experience as well as the objects or topics about which she periodically obsesses over. It ranges across painting, collage, writing, and performance. She has long carried a “running narrative” beside her life, built from notes of conversations, studio visits, and everyday occurrences.

She also compulsively gathers ephemera: photographs she takes, found packaging, and self-made prints, later recombining them with gouache surfaces, scribbled pencil lines, and silkscreened patterns. Her process unfolds mainly in her L-shaped ground-floor studio in Alt-Treptow, Berlin. The space, a former dentist’s office, is where she has been “working (and occasionally sleeping) since September 2021,” as she recalls.

However, for five months, starting from March 2025, she will be partially installed at Defet House in Nürnberg — a converted conference room inside a former paint-brush factory — on a scholarship that provides housing and art materials. Informed by these circumstances, and after receiving an abundance of high-end Da Vinci brushes and Schmincke paints, Leiby has been working on mixed-media, abstract paintings based on images taken from her daily life using branded tools.

The visual side of her practice — manifested in paintings, photographs, and collages — immediately calls to mind Sigmar Polke’s collage work. The mustard, brown, and reddish hues of Polke, together with the rough textures and loose configurations, echo Leiby’s Hope Chest and The Insecurity of Girls and the Girls that Grow Up into Women (both 2023). In these two collages, she layers torn newspaper articles, cuts of patterned gift wrap, and newspaper pages with black-and-white photocopies of Swiss Aura-Soma bottles used for “color therapy,” before overpainting them with gouache, chalk pastel, acrylic, and subtle pencil lines. Likewise, her still-life of pink beet-root tartelettes (Tarts, 2024) resonates with Polke’s Kekse (Biscuits, 1964): both depict a “gourmandize” in the abstract to foreground the social value embedded in consuming certain goods.

When pressed, Leiby gently rejected my comparison, pointing instead to influences such as Hélio Oiticica and Rochelle Feinstein. Even so, those half-founded associations still give a useful glimpse into the material and conceptual footing of her practice. Her pieces read as a contemporary refrain on capitalist realism — a similar current present in the work of artists like Sylvie Fleury, with whom Leiby coincidentally once shared the Aura-Soma motif.

Consumption is often framed as a form of self-care, and we all recognize the lift that comes from clicking the purchase button. The quick release of the right chemicals washing through the brain is familiar, and Shop by Concern (2023) stages that sensation with a gift-like panel crossed by a ribbon that splits the surface in two. One half of the panel depicts a silkscreened floral pattern; the other is a pared-back monochrome field. Wedged between the ribbon and panel are scraps of Loewe cardboard and wrapping paper — material reminders of a reward culture that keeps our dopamine on a short leash.

Another pillar of Leiby’s practice is the question of representation, which she probes by borrowing strategies from various fields spanning marketing and video-game design. Sometimes the lift is direct: in Shopping (2021), she appropriates and silkscreens fragments of KaDeWe corporate imagery onto a panel. At other times, she mocks the trend by playing the archetype herself. Her Instagram handle — @waystomakemoneyonline — mimics the ubiquitous “get rich quick” motto.

In that light, Leiby has refined the art of appropriating banal phrases as ready-mades; her canvas Morning Routine (2021) is an example. On the right, a single transparent glass holds a lemon wedge; on the left, a collage of torn magazine pages, gouache washes, and pencil lines courts disarray.

The painting appeared in her 2021 exhibition “Maturation” at Sweetwater, where works riffed on the wellness culture that flourished during the pandemic lockdowns. Trends such as drinking lemon water at daybreak helped seed today’s cult of self-optimization and longevity — marketed by figures such as bio-hacking entrepreneur Bryan Johnson (“don’t die”) and lifestyle influencer Magdalena Wosinska (33 at the time of writing). Who knows.

The once all-consuming — now forgotten — COVID-19 lockdowns forced many to turn inward, suddenly seeing ourselves and our rooms through a fresh, almost psychedelic lens. We became voyeurs in our own homes. “Objects became a thing during COVID,” Leiby remarked in a recent call. Items we had long ignored took on an uncanny presence, suddenly. With nothing else to do, you might stare at a glass of water with its lemon slice for minutes. These minimal acts turned into little rituals and, once relayed online, morphed into social phenomena promoted by self-appointed health gurus and lifestyle influencers.

That extraordinary period of our lives awoke a renewed flaneur-voyeuristic feeling for the empty city, as the state of emergency dragged on indefinitely. In that light, Bücherzelle (Sans soleil) (2021) presents the window of a small street library in Charlottenburg, where the artist was living at the time; parts of the interior remain clearly recognizable from the pavement. Floating over the photo is a slightly transparent silkscreen layer of Marine Serre’s crescent-moon motif, made ubiquitous in 2019 by Beyoncé, Lorde, Rosalía, Dua Lipa, and Kylie Jenner. Serre chose the symbol because it can signify “different things culturally, from lunar phases to ancient goddesses, Islamic iconography, and even the iconic ’90s anime Sailor Moon.”3 “Branding is the new culture,” the work seems to be hinting.

This indoor existential voyeurism expanded to the following winters after the pandemic, a time when Leiby tended to watch video game streams on YouTube. She also started observing her then-boyfriend, with whom she’d play games as well, designing one with the game engine Unity. She noticed how certain objects in games — such as candles — can serve as benchmarks to measure the skills of the designer, and, looking from a painter’s gaze, she became interested in the fact that the halo of light around a candle in video games can signal its graphic resolution. In Unity and other tools that build games, the objects or assets are created in a vacuum, suggesting a different way of “painting” or creating an image that requires a different type of skill to render it realistically.

At the same time, and for reasons tied to her own lived experience, objects assumed a renewed importance for Leiby as she “downscaled” in life. This led her to choose a deliberately low-resolution image and produce a highly detailed yet pixelated image of a candle, a recurrent trope of art history. (Gerhard Richter, one of today’s foremost hyperrealists, painted several candle pictures; Candle (1983) even appeared on Sonic Youth’s 1988 album Daydream Nation.) For Untitled (2022), Leiby hired a panel maker to make a panel the size of the candle image and then mounted the print and painted over it. The pronounced pixelation continues a chain of references that all revolve around (negative) resolution, while the work itself crystallizes her habit of fixating on a single object and testing every layer of its possible code.

Building objects digitally through 3D modeling became, for Leiby, a way to “deep-photograph” products: to capture and own them by recreating them herself, almost as acts of commemoration. In addition to modeling them amateurly herself, she also hired a specialist to produce 3D versions of the bottles she had been stockpiling in her studio. Wrapped in newspaper, bottles spanning blender shakers to La Roche-Posay serums, moisturizers, and even jars of paint thinner were first meant to be painted. She began instead testing digital still-life arrangements and learned that inside the software, you have to position a virtual camera and lights, then render the scene; only after that can the image truly be “photographed.”

Still Life with Bottles V (Monday Morning) and Still Life with Bottles I (Berlin Version) (both 2024) are part of a series of bottle still-lifes that Leiby first hand-crafted in Blender, combining her own modeled objects with assets created by freelancers and proprietary digital files she purchased.

Within each painting the bottles are in several resolutions at once, blurring polished detail with pixelated noise. The two works appeared in “Bathos” at Sweetwater in 2024 — a title lifted from conversations with her boyfriend in which something dead-serious kept being undercut by a stray joke. “Bathos,” after all, names the slide from the sublime to the ridiculous, the way the very grave can tip into the merely trivial. Leiby plays on that tension for surreal humor: tiny desserts, “little moments of heaven” — as exemplified by the petite fours in Tarts (2024) — crop up to distract us from daily global hells, tight budgets, and the housing crunch of Berlin, as she explains in her press release for “Bathos.”

Leiby’s fixation on objects echoes the aspirations promoted by countless self-appointed influencers. By appropriating — and performing — today’s click-bait strategies, she makes it clear that we are all, herself included, performers in the service of consumption. By using that language, unaltered, she exposes the surreal rhetoric that imperceptibly seeps into our daily lives. Finally, what keeps her most visceral revelations from turning cringe is the necessary distance that Clare Colebrook describes in Irony (2004)4 — the prerequisite for mastering irony itself. Working at that deliberate remove, she exposes the absurdity of habits and assumptions we treat as givens. In this inverted bathos, references to the banal are punctured by nuanced, incisive reflections on representation and reality, on resolution, and on the material conditions that mold both art and life.

All images: Photography by Avventuroso. Courtesy of the artist.

Sofia Defino Leiby (St. Paul) lives and works in Berlin. Leiby’s practice spans painting, digital media, and writing to explore themes of consumer culture, emotional nuance, and the aesthetics of daily life. Recent solo or two-person shows include Sweetwater, Berlin; Mala, Lisbon; HYLE, Athens; PAGE (NYC), New York; and Kimmerich, Berlin. Her work has been included in group shows at Sangheeut, Seoul; BINZ39, Zurich; Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna; Sweetwater, Berlin; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Green Gallery, Milwaukee. Her writing appeared in Texte zur Kunst, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Leap Art Magazine, and she has contributed to the The New York Times. She held performances at Sculpture Center, New York; Berlin Gallery Weekend; The Wig, Berlin; and Kunsthalle Zurich. In September 2025, Leiby will have her first institutional solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nürnberg.

Gabriela Acha is a writer based in Luxembourg.