Leyla Faye stages painting as a place of deliberate undoing. Animating her own body as a site of
reversal, she turns the self-portrait against itself. By subverting the canonical portrait genre into a
space to disassemble and "frankenstein" rigid notions of subjecthood, the work functions as a
hybrid of intimate reckoning and narrative proxy. Driven by a spirit of material splicing and
grafting, Faye channels the trickster as a shape-shifting disruptor—transforming mundane and
discarded materials into textural scenes that strain the seam between painting, drawing, and
sculpture. Walking the formal line of realism and reverie, her practice navigates the tension
between belonging and refusal.

Leyla Faye received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA
in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in New Haven. In September 2026, she
will present Theft of Fire, her second solo exhibition with Company Gallery, New York. Recent
solo and two-person exhibitions include Trema at Karma International, Zürich (2024); A
Requiem for Benevolent Beasts at Lindon & Co., London (2023); and Trust Fall at Company
Gallery (2023). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, Miami;
Adler Beatty, New York; Lyles & King, New York; and Almine Rech, Brussels. Her paintings are
held in the public collections of Muzeum Susch in Zernez, Switzerland, and the X Museum in
Beijing, China. She was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and currently lives and works in
Queens, New York.