Crawl under my skin
Exhibition Text for Lea Liebl’s work in Am Tisch Sein, Minus Offspace Vienna
2026
Snakeskin tightly wrapped around dumpling dough, its mixture of flour and herbs shining through the reptilian epidermis. Here is an exquisite corpse — both in its surrealist juxtaposition of unexpected materials and in the literal sense of the words: a beautiful, delicate cadaver. One’s taste can be exquisite, and so can a meal (squisito, in Italian, translates as delicious). But what is this dish lying before us? Lea Liebl’s Crawl under my skin (2022) doesn’t seem to belong to any obvious menu or taxonomy. An awkward item — like the word awkward itself, or the slithery rhythm of this sentence crawling under your skin through awkward repetitions. Liebl’s image could be a nonsense wordplay: it resolves only halfway, its meaning irreducible and open to interpretation (if snake + elephant = hat, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943) teaches us, reptilian skin + dumpling dough = ? — yet to be determined).
What one gets is the uneasy feeling of failure, as if something went wrong in the animal’s metamorphosis. The filling, jammed to the brim, slops out of one end; the snakeskin, too, has fulfilled its role, yet its gluttony lingers on. The object puts us off, and it too seems misplaced, resignedly collapsed over a milky background — are those goosebumps on its body? One can track through language the connection between anxiety and skin: irritation can be both cutaneous and psychological; something gets under our skin when it annoys us, when it gets on our nerves (a further example). Discomfort can be itchy, prickly, tingly. Scratched surfaces, inflamed sensitivities, the unresolved conflict between container and contained, between boundaries and self. The harder one tries to grasp it, the slipperier Liebl’s image becomes — it’s the weird, the icky, the erotic, the absurd, all mashed together in a serpentine culinary treat.