Sofia Defino Leiby
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1989
United States
Sweetwater
While Leiby’s works are generally classified as paintings, each often consists of layered techniques in combination, including screenprinted and collaged elements alongside oil, acrylic, watercolor brushwork. The content of her works is often drawn from her surroundings, featuring storefronts, advertising material, and commercial architecture, approached with a sensitivity toward the consumerist nature of the imagery. Walking a fine line between irony and earnestness, between skepticism and reverence, Leiby’s work portrays pressures and pleasures of urban life under the modern economy.
In addition to her painting practice, Leiby frequently creates hand-bound artist books featuring the source material from which her paintings are made, from advertisements and material scraps to diary pages and personal letters. The books, usually free for visitors to flip through, offer a counterpoint to the preciousness of the paintings, making tangible the original context of the imagery repeated on the wall.
Sofia Defino Leiby (*1989, St. Paul, US) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo shows include Sweetwater, Berlin (2021) and ‘ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE, Athens (2018). She has also recently been included in group exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Sweetwater, Berlin; Regatta 2, Düsseldorf; and Page (NYC), New York; among others. Her work and her writing have been featured in Artforum, Artnews, and Texte zur Kunst; Bauer Verlag will publish a forthcoming book of her prose in 2022. Leiby received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, and studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt.
Installation view, Sofia Defino Leiby, "Maturation" at Sweetwater, 2021
