Edel Assanti has announced the representation of Simon Lehner, following his first UK solo exhibition with the gallery, Of Peasants & Basterds.
Working across sculpture, painting, film, and installation, Lehner’s practice interrogates the relationship between the image-onslaught of the information age and psychic inner life. Lehner’s interest in internet subcultures emerges from a desire to understand his own psychology and childhood experiences better. His research probes algorithm-driven echo chambers and how they evolve into mainstream social doctrines.
Lehner’s films and paintings are created through a unique process: he aggregates thousands of images from both personal and internet-sourced archives to construct dynamic avatars in interactive digital environments. His paintings emerge through a collaboration with a modified robotic router, creating topographic surfaces that are disrupted by painterly gestures where the artist’s hand and the machine’s meet. Emblematic of the era in which they are made, the outcome of Lehner’s sophisticated layering eludes the binary of truth versus falsehood; how works relay how pixels extend and transfer into physical space; and how digital images, even when fictitious, are physical facts.
