Union

Ever since Frank Stella, we know that ‘what you see is what you see.’ In his mostly large scale paintings, Tobias Lehner [born 1974 in Regensburg] seems to depart from the same premise. He shows the viewer his major concerns as a painter. He shows that which he sees. And we see what we see: abstract shapes of colour, tectonic collisions of fields of paint, atmospherically charged geometric and technical forms. A profuse mass of organic mutations, rudimentary scriptural marks, dried paint flows, patterns, grids and Industrially printed by-products. This roughly summarises the output of a young painter from Leipzig, who seeks to visualise with emotional eruptiveness and painterly acumen-that, which other painters around him [who paint what they ‘know’] consciously evade, namely to represent in their paintings the seemingly unknown.