Felix Leon Westner’s mural work, created during a brief two-day stay, transforms the backyard of Suburbia Contemporary Barcelona into a site-specific installation. The work spans multiple walls and consists of a series of text-based interventions.
Rather than forming a single image, the mural unfolds as a constellation of phrases, gestures, and visual rhythms.
It echoes the logic of his live performances, translated into a painted, spatial condition.
This intervention marks a shift in Westner’s practice.
It extends his performance language into a more permanent form, while retaining a sense of immediacy and ephemerality.
10–15 June 2025
Felix Leon Westner’s performances are socio-critical multimedia collages of words, drawings and several live generated tracks, using his own voice and a looper. Each performance is a mainly improvised, unique piece and the point of reference is often the exhibition venue or the events meta topic itself. This is the basis of his working practice and at the same time it forms the material for his visual work.
His practice oscillates between vibrancy and concretism. The sound and the sketches are interwoven but also seem to emend each other. The words that grow out of the rushing discourse of noise can form sentences that end up as slogans in his drawings. Or they become shortened again or crossed out (which happens a lot and is a key tool of how Felix Leon molds sentences out of words, meanings out of language – and the other way around).
In between concrete poetry, music and visualization, the mutual inspirations of acoustic and visual stimuli have become an eternal, almost inexhaustible, feedback loop for Felix Leon. His works have been shown in several renowned galleries and institutions over the last years.
Felix Leon Westner was born in 1983 in Georgsmarienhütte, near Osnabrück, and did not spend much time there, moving frequently with his mother, an actress. In 1998 he moved to Munich, finished school earlier, trained as a metal worker, played drums, drew on walls, and listened mainly to hip hop, dancehall, and drum’n’bass, later working various jobs including as a bouncer at a bar called Rakete where his bike was stolen, writing and drawing fragments of conversations heard at night, and listening to electronic music, new wave, and house.
He travelled to India, where he encountered Indian pop, Goa trance, and traditional chanting, returned after nine months, and played again in a funk band. In 2007 he began studying fine arts while working at trade fairs as a stand builder to afford it, overpainting fair advertisements and continuing to move between music, drawing, and emerging visual practice.
He worked with video, traces, drawing, and text, attempting to write songs, remaining active between Munich and Leipzig, collaborating with Julius Heinemann, spending time in Cairo, and studying with Olaf Nicolai, where installation and performance became central fields of negotiation.
He spent time in Hamburg due to a relationship, and in 2010 became a father of a daughter (Mathilda) with his partner Sarah Lehnerer, taking on care responsibilities and living in intensified family structures. In 2014 he moved to Vienna, where he started drawing more, made music with Bernhard Rappold and Carlos Vasconcelos, and engaged with noise music.
He received the Bavarian State Prize, performed extensively, returned to wall drawing, and in 2015 moved to Berlin, where he and his partner separated but continued living together for a period before moving apart, working across shifting domestic and studio conditions.
He worked at a framers shop to sustain his practice, framed most of his works, established his first proper studio, experienced a series of material and logistical shifts including a broken car and a colder, larger studio environment, moving between performance and drawing practices.
During lockdown he unframed most works, participated in his first biennale without physical presence, performed less, and continued to live in Berlin, recently undergoing a wisdom tooth extraction.
His performances are socio-critical multimedia collages of words, drawings, and live-generated tracks using his voice and a looper, where each performance is mainly improvised and site- or context-responsive, often referencing the exhibition venue or its meta-topic as a structural point of departure.
This forms the basis of his working practice and material source for his visual work, where sound and sketches interweave and mutually modify each other, with words emerging from rhythmic discourse of noise and transforming into sentences, slogans, or fragmented textual structures that are repeatedly rewritten, shortened, or crossed out, forming a central operational method in his practice.
Between concrete poetry, music, and visualization, acoustic and visual stimuli operate as a continuous feedback loop that defines his production, with works presented in several galleries and institutions internationally over recent years.
