Aula aberta DAP com Lea Grebe
Of bodies changed to other forms
Museu da FBAUP
29 de Abril 2026, às 17h
“Of bodies changed to other forms I tell.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 1)
Lea Grebe’s art deals with the observation of nature at the intersections of science and technology. Based on the artist’s personal archive of insects found dead, which was built over the last couple of years, a wide variety of questions for new works emerges. For her, the class of insects is exempla-ry of the creatures that surround us and the ecosystems they animate. Insects reflect and analyse man’s interest in the orders imposed by nature. Her small bronze sculptures of individual animals and plants refer to a reprocessing of nature that transforms living flora and fauna into relics of conservation and musealisation.
In her recent works, Grebe creates hybrid objects that merge biological motifs with domestic furniture forms. Cabinets and vitrines become habitats for bronze-cast fungi, galls, and cocoons, appearing to grow from within and transforming utilitarian objects into living environments.
By using materials such as wood, glass, and bronze, Grebe inverts traditional hierarchies of sculpture. Bronze, a material of permanence, preserves ephemeral organisms and reveals the delicate balance between preservation and decay, dominance and vulnerability, culture and nature. Her works envision a world where the boundaries between naturalia and artificialia blur, exposing how cultural and biological histories are deeply intertwined.
Fascinated by collaborative interactions between animals and plants, Lea Grebe conceives works that examine these symbioses between animals and nature as models for human behaviour.
Central to her work is the concept of transformation, a state that harbours the possibility and hope of change. For her, however, it is also “about the search for new ecological empathic ways of thinking. The aim is to imagine a world view that is not human-centred. The aim is to promote a perception that is not only focused on oneself, but also on the other, the counterpart and the alien.”
Lea Grebe, b. 1987, Munich, Germany; lives and works in Munich.
She studied Painting and Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich under Prof. Axel Kasseböhmer, completing her studies as a master student in 2018. She also holds a Magister Artium in Art Education, Art History, and Modern German Literature from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Lea Grebe has received grants and scholarships from the City of Nuremberg, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and the State of Bavaria (Cité des Arts, Paris). Her work has been shown in institutions such as Kunsthalle Mannheim, Museum Sinclair-Haus, and Museum Wiesbaden, and is represented in the Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany.
