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Yours, KOW

I Love You Like an Image, 2023

Exhibition at Kunstpalais Erlangen

In his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Lehner uses new works to establish the link between the mass media flood of images and the psychic inner life. Contents of a collective digital unconscious push to the surface of the image and compete intrusively for attention. The fragmentation of the self-image runs like a thread through Lehner's work, as does the tendency to pull the rug out from under any completed imaging process. His works suggest a continuous movement from photographic relic to 3D video works and virtual simulations to kinetic sculpture - and vice versa. The boundary between the medial outside world and the inner performance become fluid, whereby his critical questions about original certainty never quite let go of the artist.

Acrylic on unique foam plate – lens-based CNC Painting
2 parts, 200 x 200 x 8 cm and 200 x 120 x 8 cm

Stainless steel, aluminium, silicon, epoxy, sound, 7 channel video
160 x 150 x 150 cm

Lacque on unique CNC-milled
200 x 170 x 30 cm

Acrylic on unique foam plate – lens-based CNC Painting
90 x 77 x 4,5 cm

Silikon, Motor, Kunstharz, Aluminium, Lack
175 x 60 x 65 cm

Acrylic on unique wood plate - lens-based CNC Painting
150 x 120 x 8 cm

Acrylic on CNC-milled wood plate
19 x 14 x 10 cm

Acrylic on unique foam plate – lens-based CNC-Painting
216 x 215 x 25 cm

  • INDEX:

Simon Lehner

My Mountain Has No Summit, 2023–ongoing
I Love You Like an Image, 2023
„I‘m a liar, but a good one“, 2021–22
The mind is a voice, the voice is blind, 2019–21
Men Don't Play, 2015–19
How far is a lightyear?, 2005–19

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).



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