Events/Openings

Andrea Lehnert, born in Dortmund/DE in 1974, studied painting at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. In 2002, professor Siegfried Anzinger awarded her the title of Meisterschülerin.

Who are these two women we approach so closely in an intimate moment? Two ladies in evening dress, perhaps, who carefully inspect their appearances in a mirror? The woman in the foreground places a hand on her hip, which gives her posture a gentle swaying character. Only this gesture really shows off her elegance to best advantage. The left arm is covered, perhaps by a bright scarf draped across her shoulder, or by a long glove in matching colour. The second figure in the background is only suggested. A single detail hints that the yellow-violet colour field stands for a person: the folds of the skirt, which ripple across the floor. Is all of this pure fantasy? Are these ladies perhaps not standing before an imaginary mirror, but instead shopping in everyday clothes: long skirts and veiling scarves? Decisive here is the way this artist interprets her motif, and the way the viewer – despite decomposition and abstraction – discerns something there: the familiar or the strange?

In contrast to the paintings of women who the viewer watches unnoticed or from a distant point of view, the second group of paintings stages a dialogue of sorts. Peering out of the paintings, the horses fix their gazes on those of the viewer. What makes them seem so alive, so animate? What forms their characters as they look out – so self-sufficient, shy, and yet curious – into our world? What is the secret of these paintings? It cannot lie in verisimilitude, since they do not describe, but only insinuate, seem to fray at the edges, at times even to dissolve into coloured brushstrokes. This painterly openness conceals nothing; it displays the entire process of its formation – from the old-masterly priming all the way to the almost painful candour and transparency of the paint application. On the compositional level, however, that which seems so searching and spontaneous reveals an extraordinary precision. Nothing about these horses seems merely incidental; they dominate the space like staged sculptures. It is colour, which continually takes the viewer by surprise and confounds expectations. The colour shapes the space, separating light from shade and allowing – for a suspended moment – a view into a strange world. Or is it actually the viewer, in the end, who is under inspection?

Uniting all of the paintings in the exhibition is the erratic guise of their figures (lat. erraticus: wandering). They neither narrate nor invent; they are windows onto the foreign.