Between Worlds

I’m Lukas Leibe – a Berlin-based actor and artist, raised somewhere between football fields, the stage and paint-stained notebooks.

For more than a decade, I’ve told stories through film, television and theatre. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a brush and never really put it down.

Painting gave me something I hadn’t found anywhere else: complete freedom. No script, no director, no one telling me what something had to become. Just me, a blank canvas and the possibility of not knowing where it would lead.

I never studied art. I learned by experimenting, ruining things, painting over them and starting again. For a long time, I searched for a visual language that actually felt like my own. Eventually, the things I kept returning to began to come together.

I call it Textured Realism.

My paintings often begin as almost entirely abstract surfaces. I build them through layers of acrylic, paste, glazes, translucent pigments and other materials – sometimes more than forty layers in a single painting. I smear, scratch, wash things out, cover them and begin again.

Somewhere between intuition and analysis, a world starts to emerge.

Sometimes I know exactly what belongs there. Sometimes the painting tells me first.

A small, almost realistic figure enters an abstract surface. A shadow gives it weight. Suddenly, what was paint becomes space – a tiny world opening beneath us, with the viewer looking in as a quiet observer.

That transformation is what fascinates me.

My work is often reduced, but never simple. I’m interested in the tension between realism and abstraction, control and coincidence, stillness and emotion. From a distance, you see the illusion. Move closer and it begins to dissolve back into texture, pigment, scratches and traces of the process that created it.

At the heart of it, I’m always asking myself the same questions:

How little does it take to move someone?
What remains when you remove the noise?

I paint fleeting moments, quiet thoughts and chaotic feelings, but I don’t want to explain them.

My paintings don’t explain. They leave space for you to find your own story.

Acting and painting are two very different parts of my life, but they come from the same urge to explore emotion and connect with another person. Performance gives me energy. Painting gives me space.

On stage or in front of a camera, I become someone else for a while.

On canvas, I become more myself.

I don’t know exactly where either path will lead, and I no longer think I have to choose between them.

I just want to keep making things that make me feel something.

And hopefully, every now and then, make you feel something too.