Helena Leeners: Touch Grass

In Germany, people work an average of around 1,340 hours per year. Some on construction sites, some in supermarkets, others hunched over laptops, day after day.

The paintings made by Berlin artist Helena Leeners explore a deeper kind of exhaustion: a quiet, persistent fatigue shaped by routine, pressure, and the constant pull of productivity. It is about the longing for freedom, for real life beyond the screen — and, in its most simple and honest form, for touching some grass.

Artist Helena Leeners knows this state intimately. All works in the exhibition were created alongside her full-time job at a Berlin advertising agency — in the margins of time, where fatigue and desire meet.