Of Peasants & Basterds

Edel Assanti is pleased to present Vienna-based artist Simon Lehner’s first UK solo exhibition, '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. His research probes algorithm-accelerated echo chambers as they evolve into mainstream social doctrines. 'Of Peasants & Basterds' announces its theme with a wax sculpture of the word “Community,” installed to gradually melt over the course of the exhibition. This word resonates squeamishly with a generation who were spoon-fed utopian visions of a diverse, borderless community interconnected by benevolent Tech...

Edel Assanti is pleased to present Vienna-based artist Simon Lehner’s first UK solo exhibition, '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. His research probes algorithm-accelerated echo chambers as they evolve into mainstream social doctrines.

'Of Peasants & Basterds' announces its theme with a wax sculpture of the word “Community,” installed to gradually melt over the course of the exhibition. This word resonates squeamishly with a generation who were spoon-fed utopian visions of a diverse, borderless community interconnected by benevolent Tech Giants. As a harbinger of societal polarisation unleashed by this revolution, the sculpture is irony- laden; a relic of vacuous corporate advertising, dissolving into oblivion.

Lehner’s focus on groups that proliferate toxic ideals of hyper-masculinity is a case-study in the weaponisation of images, and the power imbalance between the individual and the technologies that now drive collective consciousness. 'Of Peasants& Basterds' expands Lehner’s inquiry into the role of pictures as instruments of manipulation, beginning with a reference to the history of painting.

His new series of paintings are made through a unique process developed by the artist: compositions are created using thousands of images aggregated from both his private and collective archives to construct interactive 3D digital spaces populated by avatars. Within these environments, the artist assumes a puppeteer role, limitlessly manipulating his characters and props before translating them into films, animatronic sculptures or paintings. The paintings materialise Lehner’s scenes through a collaboration with an adapted robotic router where the artist’s hand and the machine’s meet. Emblematic of the technological era in which they are made, the sophisticated layering of Lehner’s paintings complicate our ability to distinguish depth and authorship, real from simulation, truth from falsehood.

SimonvLehner. Photo by Maximilian Pramatarov

Simon Lehner (b. 1996, Wels, Austria) the Vienna-based artist was born in 1996 - is characterized by a recurring traumatic structure. A structure in which human emotions and memories converge with processes of artificial intelligence that reconstruct the past, the buried or the repressed, but also deform it and remove it from human control. In this way, works are created t...

Simon Lehner (b. 1996, Wels, Austria) the Vienna-based artist was born in 1996 - is characterized by a recurring traumatic structure. A structure in which human emotions and memories converge with processes of artificial intelligence that reconstruct the past, the buried or the repressed, but also deform it and remove it from human control. In this way, works are created that draw on private and public image archives and work on a contemporary iconography of the psychic state of emergency. A state that not least shakes male self-images, which are in any case and rightly in question, but which Lehner also problematizes as a highly ambivalent question of identity and toxic masculinity. Lehner moves pictorially between classical photography, digital forms of production, and painting. He has been awarded with many prizes throughout the years such as FOAM Talent 2021, Ö1 Talentfund Winner 2020 and more. His work has been presented in major solo exhibitions, most recently being Simon Lehner (Kunstpalais Erlangen 2023), Spark Art Fair (Vienna 2022), I´m A Liar, but A Good One (Vienna 2021) and meaningful group exhibitions as yours truly, (Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen 2023), Zeit (Kunsthaus Zürich 2023) and Expect The Unexpected (Kunstmuseum Bonn 2023).