Merav Leibküchler

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

My practice moves between painting, installation and performance, asking how a form acquires presence and when it begins to dissolve. A background in contemporary dance and choreography shapes how I work with weight, balance, resistance and the intervals between movements. In my paintings, sharply modelled oil forms meet charcoal traces, blurred contours and open fields. Oil gives fragments density and an almost tangible surface, while charcoal disperses into dust, lines and shadows. Forms suggest bodies, plants or insects without resolving into a single identity. Through layering, obscuring and revealing, I bring precise forms into contact with marks that interrupt their apparent solidity. In installations, fabric, rope and thread extend these tensions into architectural space. Suspended and stretched materials carry weight, obstruct views and change with the position of the viewer. During performances, my body becomes part of these structures, moving with and against their resistance. Fabric can conceal the source of movement even as it makes that movement visible. Sound gives these encounters another rhythm and duration. Across these media, I return to a question rooted in dance: where does movement go when the body becomes still? A taut rope, a fold of fabric or a charcoal trace can hold the suggestion of an action. I work with this tension between what is physically present and what remains implied.

Artwork