Summer guest 2014: Volker Lehnert "A little suspicion in forest pieces"
Accompanying our exhibition in Dätzingen Castle, we show here paintings, works on paper and lithographs by the artist and professor and prorector at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart Volker Lehnert.
Lehnert plays as a seemingly uninvolved observer with different fields of perception or memory patterns: Figure, landscape, architecture, which mix enigmatically as drawing internal structures with sometimes glaring iridescent, sometimes gloomy color veils of glazed pigmented egg tempera.
In broadly conceived series, he seeks "the point where what is known, felt, and seen are brought together in the picture to form a unity." The scenic, surreal-looking depictions contain comic and Western motifs, as well as military operations, which stand out in jungle-like or boulder environment stencil-like and thus in part ironic, part critical refraction.
Lehnert's formal interest can be seen in palimpsest-like or children's drawings imitating traces. In his more recent works, however, the figurative moments recede in favor of a more vegetative-abstract density.