Leonhard Göhler: FAIRY TALES FOR THE FEED
There’s a tiny, almost throwaway detail in Leonhard Göhler’s current series on ARTCLUB: a floating red heart, the kind you know from screens, not from canvases. It hovers near a phone like a reflex made visible. One glance and the painting stops being “about” a couple in a room and starts being about all of us—how attention works now, how affection gets measured, how intimacy is constantly interrupted by the need to be seen.
Göhler’s paintings are instantly legible. Bright, flat fields of color. Clear outlines. Figures that look like they stepped out of a children’s storybook, a cartoon, or a half-remembered meme. But the longer you stay with them, the more their simplicity turns into a trapdoor. The humor is real—these images often make you smile first—but the aftertaste is quieter: a strange tenderness, a soft discomfort, the sense that something familiar has been shifted a few millimeters out of place.
We’re publishing this text ourselves, so let’s be honest about what we’re doing: with this online selection, we’re introducing Leonhard Göhler as a new artist on ARTCLUB and putting a coherent body of work into conversation with the way people actually live today. Not through big slogans or heavy theory, but through scenes that feel like snapshots you can’t quite place: domestic closeness, small power dynamics, fantasy figures used like emotional stand-ins, and the persistent presence of “the feed” as an invisible third person in the room.
A SERIES THAT READS LIKE A SEQUENCE
The works currently online on ARTCLUB unfold like a loose sequence of chapters rather than a single statement. You move from one scene to the next the way you move through a timeline: different moments, similar tensions.
One painting shows a figure in a red tracksuit leaning over someone asleep—an image that could be read as care, need, or something more complicated. The closeness is undeniable, but so is the asymmetry: one awake, one withdrawn; one reaching, one resting. The room is reduced to essentials, the red background amplifying the emotional temperature like a stage light.
Another image is almost comically contemporary: a couple stands side by side, yet the focus pulls toward a phone and that hovering heart icon. The distance between the two bodies is small, but the distance between their attention is huge. It’s funny because it’s true—and uncomfortable because it’s true.
Then Göhler introduces fairy-tale figures, not as nostalgia but as a language for the present. Pinocchio appears not as a moral lesson, but as a character caught inside our current rituals of self-image: lifted into frame, posed, and extended toward the world on a selfie stick. The old story about lying turns into something else: what it means to present yourself, to perform a version of “real,” to live with the constant possibility of being evaluated.
Elsewhere, the cast expands: a green dragon, rendered with the straightforward boldness of a child’s drawing—yet placed like a symbol you’re supposed to interpret. A mermaid meets a man at the edge of a bright blue field, a scene that reads like a myth colliding with an everyday relationship. A construction-worker figure—instantly recognizable as a pop-cultural archetype—shares space with a human companion, as if “building” and “fixing” have become emotional roles rather than jobs.
Even when Göhler’s references are playful, they never feel like simple jokes. They function like shortcuts to shared memory. Everyone recognizes the characters. That recognition is the entry point. What happens next—what you project into the scene, what you notice about yourself while looking—is where the paintings start to deepen.
THE LOOK: CLEAN SURFACES, LOUD COLORS, QUIET TENSION
Göhler’s visual language is direct. He’s not trying to overwhelm with complexity. He’s doing something harder: making paintings that are immediately accessible without becoming shallow.
The compositions are often built from large, confident color planes. The figures are simplified, but not careless. They hold poses that read as emotional signals: leaning, turning away, lifting, holding, hovering. Backgrounds are reduced to what the scene needs—sometimes a wall, sometimes a landscape framed like a window, sometimes almost nothing at all. This reduction creates clarity, and clarity creates pressure. With fewer distractions, every gesture matters.
The works feel like they understand how we look today. We’re trained by screens to scan quickly, to decode images fast. Göhler meets that speed—and then slows it down. A painting may look like a quick read, but it resists closure. You think you understand what’s happening, and then a detail changes the whole tone: the heart icon, the puppet’s long nose, the strange creature placed between two people like an unspoken topic.
HUMOR AS A METHOD (NOT A MOOD)
On the artist page, we describe Göhler’s approach as playful—able to make viewers smile and think at the same time. That isn’t a marketing phrase; it’s a good key for reading the series.
The playfulness is not a lack of seriousness. It’s a method for delivering seriousness without preaching. In a time when “statements” are instantly categorized and fought over, humor can be a way to keep the image open. It disarms you. It lets the work speak in a voice that feels close to ordinary life, not above it.
Göhler’s humor is also gentle. The paintings don’t mock their characters. Even when a scene is absurd—Pinocchio pushed into a selfie moment, a dragon appearing like a misunderstood pet—there’s empathy in the way the figures are handled. These are not caricatures of “other people.” They’re portraits of situations we recognize: craving approval, struggling to connect, performing confidence, hiding vulnerability in plain sight.
MYTHOLOGY FOR MODERN RELATIONSHIPS
One of the strongest aspects of the current series is how Göhler uses myth and pop culture as emotional infrastructure.
Fairy-tale characters work because they’re shared. You don’t need an explanation. Pinocchio, the mermaid, the dragon—these figures arrive with a history already attached. Göhler doesn’t illustrate that history; he repurposes it. He places the characters inside scenes that feel contemporary in their emotional logic: attention as currency, affection as performance, closeness as something negotiated rather than given.
A mermaid, in this context, isn’t just a fantasy. She becomes a metaphor for difference inside intimacy—what’s beautiful and strange, what doesn’t fully translate, what gets exoticized or feared. A dragon isn’t just a monster. It’s a visible form for the thing nobody wants to name: jealousy, desire, shame, the “third element” that can sit inside relationships like a silent animal.
And Pinocchio—maybe the most precise symbol of all—turns into an avatar for the current self. Not “the liar,” but “the curated.” The nose isn’t just about deception. It’s about distortion: what happens when identity is built for a gaze.
THE STUDIO AS CONTEXT: BIG PAINTINGS, INTIMATE THEMES
The studio images included alongside the online selection reinforce something important: these paintings aren’t only quick visual hits. They exist as physical works with scale and presence.
Seeing the artist next to a large canvas—one of those bright, narrative scenes—shifts the reading. What looks like a simple, almost “graphic” image on a screen becomes more complicated in real space: the painting’s size turns a private moment into something architectural, something you stand in front of. The surface becomes part of the experience. The clarity becomes confrontational in the best way.
This matters, especially online. We’re used to viewing paintings as thumbnails. Göhler’s work, in particular, plays with that habit: it borrows the immediacy of digital images, but it rewards the kind of sustained looking that screens usually discourage.
WHY THIS SERIES FITS ARTCLUB RIGHT NOW
ARTCLUB is building a space where contemporary art isn’t locked behind gatekeeping language. Göhler’s work aligns with that mission, not because it’s “easy,” but because it’s honest about how people actually see and feel in 2025.
These paintings don’t pretend the digital world isn’t real. They don’t pretend love is pure, or that attention is harmless, or that myth is something we outgrow. Instead, they show how all of these things collide: fairy-tale characters in modern rituals, tenderness tangled with distraction, humor sitting right next to melancholy.
If you only take one thing from this series, take this: Göhler paints the emotional reality behind the image economy. He paints the quiet moments where relationships are negotiated—where someone looks away, where someone holds on, where someone tries to turn life into a picture and hope the picture loves them back.
