BREAKING AWAY FROM THE LEIPZIG...
Breaking away from the Leipzig tradition of figurative painting, Lehner creates abstract landscapes that start with music as a point of reference.Music is an important influence on the artist and Lehner draws parallels between the composition of an audio space to that of a two dimensional. He understands the surface of a painting to be a free flowing organisation of space, and as a riverbed flows through dense urban areas, we find that he has created familiar stylistic motifs that link, to create complex and visually tense compositions.
These motifs range from pure abstraction to rigid geometry and quotes from art history. The paintings can be characterised by the strong visual contrast between these motifs and how they connect uncomfortably with the surrounding blank spaces that lie on the surface.
Lehner’s tense landscapes reflect the visual world whereby one has to imagine and construct the figures as protagonists because his paintings are defined by a distinct understanding of the abstract and how such a world, seemingly smooth on the surface operates against the saturation of optical information.