At Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen in Germany, Leon Simonis presents Vessels of Unbecoming—an exhibition of sculptures in latex, resin, and stainless steel that dissolve the boundaries between human, animal, and plant, drawing on queer theory and speculative mythology.
At the Schaufenster junge Kunst in Sindelfingen, Leon Simonis (*2001) has constructed an exhibition that oscillates between experiential environment and spiritual landscape. Vessels of Unbecoming gathers sculptures in latex, plant-based resin, goatskin, and stainless steel into a space where mythical, religious, and contemporary narratives merge into what the artist calls a speculative mythology—an interface between tradition and reinvention, between collective memory and an imagined future.
The windows are the first thing you encounter. Covered in Veil (2024–ongoing), a fragile latex work whose organically intertwining strands depict sclerotization—the biochemical process through which an insect’s exoskeleton hardens from something soft and vulnerable into a protective shell. Like stained glass, these veils refract light and tell stories, giving the exhibition its outer form. At the centre of the first room stands A Manifesto of Unbecoming (2025/2026), where three spinal columns orbit the spherical tip of a sceptre. The classic Trinity composition of Christian iconography is expanded and disrupted by queer theory: the number three becomes a destabilising factor, opening a space of possibility beyond binary orders.
In the second room, Victoria: The Becoming of a Beast (2025) floats in a round stainless-steel basin—an epoxy resin mould of a Victoria amazonica leaf shown not from above but from its hidden underside, which appears sinewy, fleshy, almost animalistic. The sculpture draws on a folk tale in which a girl, in love with the moon, mistakes its reflection in the water for the celestial body itself and drowns while reaching for it. "Out of compassion, the moon transforms the girl into a plant." Loss becomes a prerequisite for transformation, and the water—like a baptismal font—marks initiation and renewal.
Behind a black chiffon curtain, Nepenthes: Through Matter (2025) hangs at the centre of an intimate, almost sacred space—a pitcher plant whose interior is coated in Musou Black, the deepest light-absorbing pigment, directing the gaze inward and silencing all distraction. Seductive and threatening in equal measure, it becomes a confessor into whose throat we symbolically cast our sins. Throughout the exhibition, Simonis conceives materials and plants as fragile bodies—not finished forms but snapshots of transition that always carry the possibility of another form within them. Truth here is not singular or absolute but fluid, composite, and resistant to final codification.
