Andrea Lehmann

Andrea Lehmann - Gloomy portraits of women and surreal nightmare worlds

Born in Düsseldorf in 1975, Andrea Lehmann enjoyed visiting the museums in her hometown from an early age and was particularly drawn to the works of Old Masters. In contrast to her own early attempts at drawing, studying these pictures gave her an idea of the broad perspective that painting offered. The extravagant Italian Baroque painter Salvator Rosa made a particular impression with his lustful nightmares, which were to become almost programmatic for Lehmann's later work. The paintings of the surrealists also inspired Lehmann on her path to becoming an artist, which she began in 1995 with high expectations as a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In 2000, she became a master student of Markus Lüpertz, who gave her plenty of freedom to make her own decisions and take responsibility and that same year, Andrea Lehmann also began exhibiting her work; to date, she has taken part in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad. In 2001 she received a travelling scholarship from the Friends and Sponsors of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and in 2002 she was awarded her academy diploma. 

Man and animal merge into a grotesque cabinet

Andrea Lehmann's painting style combines characteristics of hyperrealist painting, Neo-Romanticism and Japanese manga. Her early work was primarily based on gloomy portraits of women, executed in an idiosyncratic visual language somewhere between fairytale and nightmare. Later, the artist's gaze widened to include entire scenes in which women always play an important role, as fairytale fairies disfigured into corpses, horse-headed competitors or naked shepherdesses. A recurring motif is people, here too mostly women, who tame wild animals or creatures. In her work, humans and animals meet as a matter of course, sometimes merging with one another and cannot always be clearly separated from one another in the events depicted. However, the animal people in particular do not serve the purpose of spreading terror, but often represent the gentle calm of a picture - despite their grotesque appearance, they are not enemy figures, but rather friends and helpers.

Painting only creates an outer reflection of inner images

Andrea Lehmann sees no contradiction between classical painting and the ever-increasing production of digital images. She sees the increase in images through digital possibilities as a fertilising process that stimulates the creation of new works of art. The artist does not wish to express a specific message with her work, but rather to make visible something of the inner images that characterise her soul and which can never be fully conveyed in an external work of art. More recently, Lehmann has become increasingly interested in the third dimension, allowing her visions to gain expansive depth with the help of cardboard displays and folding pictures. Andrea Lehmann's art is also increasingly being received outside of museums and galleries: she created a suitable visual framework for the first German edition of the novel Kindheitshefte (Childhood Notebooks) by the celebrated Argentinian writer Norah Lange (1905 - 1972), originally published in 1937.

Andrea Lehmann lives and works in Düsseldorf.