Simon Lehner

**My Mountain Has No Summit, 2023–ongoing**

**„I‘m a liar, but a good one“, 2021–22**

**The mind is a voice, the voice is blind, 2019–21**

Simon Lehner's still young work - the Vienna-based artist was born in 1996 - is characterized by a recurring traumatic structure. A structure in which human emotions and memories converge with processes of artificial intelligence that reconstruct the past, the buried or the repressed, but also deform it and remove it from human control. In this way, works are created that draw on private and public image archives and work on a contemporary iconography of the psychic state of emergency. A state that not least shakes male self-images, which are in any case and rightly in question, but which Lehner also problematizes as a highly ambivalent question of identity and toxic masculinity. Lehner moves pictorially between classical photography, digital forms of production, and painting. He has been awarded with many prizes throughout the years such as FOAM Talent 2021, Ö1 Talentfund Winner 2020 and more.

His work has been presented in major solo exhibitions, most recently being Simon Lehner (Kunstpalais Erlangen 2023), Spark Art Fair (Vienna 2022), I´m A Liar, but A Good One (Vienna 2021) and meaningful group exhibitions as yours truly, (Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen 2023), Zeit (Kunsthaus Zürich 2023) and Expect The Unexpected (Kunstmuseum Bonn 2023).

Full Biography

Exhibitions at KOW