ABOUT

HERMANN LEDERLE

Critically admired german artist Hermann Lederle is most prominent for his PIXEL and BLOTS painting and more recent ADAPTATION series. His works have shown in numerous exhibitions around the world, and his artistic production is particularly unique and recognizable. Although initially the impression is abstract, Lederle's works feature geometric elements that compose, as a whole, figurative elements, bringing to mind that of the abstract expressionists.

Los Angeles artist Hermann Lederle is known for his innovative BEAUTIFUL CHAOS abstract canvas scapes and unique BREAKAWAY layered PIXEL painting. Blurring the boundaries between paint-scape and landscape reality, and between the paint and its intended object, the work combines geometric abstraction and pure color concept to explore a new ethereal thematic. Through a PILLING of dotted lines and multitude of hyper-glow colors - as if the artist intends to assault the surface with micro-nuclear forces, Lederle constructs a next generation art-scape.

Upon graduating from Karl Friedrich School Mannheim for humanist and classic studies in Germany, Lederle re-directed his career path. His early apprenticeship training in photography inspired him to seek a formal continued education in the Fine Arts, namely filmmaking and painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.
San Francisco became his new residency for the next years until graduating with a BFA, followed by five years establishing himself as a painter in the thriving arts district of Tribeca in downtown New York City. It was there, Lederle began to formulate his own visual language to express his concepts and ideas through the lens, on canvas and on the film screen. Exemplifying the artist’s interest in the interaction between art and film and creating an additional link to 21st century web based digital art, Lederle's painting strives to wipe clean the slate of conventional notions of image construction.

Lederle's PIXEL series, first shown at Media Rare Gallery in Hollywood suggests a kind of Cubism for the digital age. His work as a filmmaker cross-pollinates in subtle, oblique ways. The idea of pixel paintings originated when working with digital images. “It was a discovery. We may have been seeing this way unconsciously since human beings had eyes, but now that we know we can zoom in on something, and then zoom out and see the whole picture, it becomes an awareness we can use to appreciate the pixilated version. Kind of like a primal, pre-conscious experience that relates to the era of technology."

Lederle's FOOTPRINTS ON SNOW series entails a two stage process, where a graduated color is applied with a tractional brush allowing for the distinct qualities of its stroke to emerge. The second stage is executed with a painter's knife often with ostensibly contradictory linear shapes and lines, imbuing it with the properties of rival perceptions, irreversible like footprints, taking place within the canvases.

More recently, in his so-called ADAPTATION series, those vertical bands consist of the vivid and expressionistic decades-old paintings that Lederle has painstakingly hand-cut and then collaged onto the canvas, leaving just enough space for original marks to show through as interstices of the canvas. Punctuated with a stop and go rhythm, the work reigns in the artist’s prior unbidden flourishes and lays bare the source of artistic inspiration, simultaneously suggesting themes of evolution as they relate to Lederle's own practice and reflections on art history.

His latest works in submission on the occasion of IN SPRING Exhibition 2024, recall the BLOTS-pointillism of the neoimpressionists. When purposely set against a SCHIENA SCURA - dark FOAM bubbles, the painting is calling out a messy, un-ordered free floating imagery of some scenery not quite in focus and frozen in a still frame, although its kinetic forces relentlessly pushing up against its limits. The experimental composition of primal shapes and lines striving for a creative expression of artificial, nearly molecular spaces in another dimension and direction. These images take time to absorb, asking you to invest and trust, not speed through in a frenzy. A new-dimensional structure slowly emerges transcending past traditional geometrics.

Hermann Lederle's work has been exhibited in the United States in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Canada, Germany, Italy, France and Hungary. A body of his work is in consignment at galleries, including DSV Kunstkontor Stuttgart, HPH Siebdruck Echterdingen Germany, Media Rare Gallery Los Angeles, Court Gallery New York, Lawson Galleries San Francisco, Friedman Guinness Gallery Heidelberg, and in private collections of Ringo Starr, Eric Stolz, Cal Zecca, Gabor Csupo.

Lederle lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Previous notable exhibitions took place at M.A.D.S. Art Gallery ANDRENOCHROMO FOR DINNER Milan Italy 2022, ART KARLSRUHE HPH Special Serigraph Exhibition Germany 2020, Silverman Studio Hollywood 2017, Vertiva Stuttgart Germany 2015, Arthea Galerie Mannheim Germany 2015, Frank Pictures Gallery Santa Monica 2012, Solaris Gallery Los Angeles 2005, FP Gallery Los Angeles 2005, Media Rare Gallery Hollywood 2001, Lawson Galleries San Francisco 1986 and Court Gallery New York City 1986.

Essay

HUFF POST ARTS 8.29.2015

Adaptation by James Scarborough

Hermann Lederle’s “Adaptation,” 2015, is massive. Measuring five and a half feet by ten feet, this totemic monument doesn’t just envelop you, it anchors you to the ground. Reminiscent of partially open Levelor blinds, a network of dense and narrow vertical bands sweep across the canvas. There’s more weight at the center; this makes the surface quiver and shimmer, like water burbling over an outcropping of coral just beneath the surface of a roiling sea. Without fully revealing it, the piece suggests an expanse of pictorial depth. It accommodates something that is turbulent and veiled, expressionistic and controlled. This balance suggests a mystery, a conundrum, a koan.

You read it up and down, down and up, systematically working your way across. A crescendo from left to right, a climax at the middle, and then a denouement until the right edge. Structurally it’s the painterly equivalent of Guillaume Apollinaire’s pictorial poem, “Il Pleut,”...

ARTWEEK SAN FRANCISCO October 1987

'A Touch Of Chicanery'

BY James Scarborough

Hermann Lederle's new work at Lawson Galleries perfectly illustrates Jose Orega y Gasset's contention in The Modern Theme that art, along with culture, reason and ethics, must enter the service of life. Ortega y Gasset prescribes, among other things, an art that is spontaneous, athletic and imbued with vitality; he finds it most apt that modern public history began on a tennis court in France.

Ortega y Gasset discerns a one-sided tendency in modern European history, the intellectual heritage into which Lederle, a German, was born. Here, there was a separation of culture and life as art distanced itself from the spontaneous life of the person considering it and acquired a consistency of its own: culture thereby became objective, set up in opposition...

Review

HUFFINGTON POST April 16, 2012

'Footprints on Snow'

Imagine Claude Monet's pastel Poplars... if Monet was working 100 years later and spent a lot of time on the internet... and you get somewhere close to the work of Hermann Lederle.

The German painter, who now resides in Los Angeles, gives impressionism a contemporary inflection. Where before wispy brushstrokes and springtime hues ruled, Lederle works in the colors and shapes of our time. His paintings have an edge to them and an electric energy pulsing throughout. Lederle creates his 3-D effect by first painting with a traditional brush and then reworking it with a painter's knife, giving the paint a contradictory texture.

Lederle's paintings capture how it feels to see in the modern world. Waterlilies are replaced with welcome screens and rolling sunsets with flashing advertisements. But there is a beauty to this contemporary image of seeing, even if it is a little sharp around the edges.

ART KNOWLEDGE NEWS April 4, 2012

'Footprints on Snow'

Lederle's paintings continue to evolve with dense color expanses woven into heavily textured line structures. The latest series entails a two-stage process, where at first a graduated color is applied with a traditional brush allowing for the distinct qualities of its stroke to emerge. The second stage is executed with a painter's knife often with ostensibly contradictory linear shapes and lines, imbuing it with the properties of rival perceptions taking place within the canvases. "Lederle’s work has a 3-D, almost architectural reality," says gallerist Laurie Frank, "achieved without employing geometry. He creates a progression of inner space expanse that the paintings invite you to enter as an explorer evoking the thrilling sensation of stepping on virgin ground."

Article

I M A G E S Y S T E M August 2003

BY Mia Taylor

"What interests me is not just the complete picture, but a minute detail or a particular interaction which has to do with how an individual sees the world. Knowing what happened in the past and then projecting the future, you suspend yourself in that moment of time"

Hermann Lederle's work is not easy to categorize. Encompassing a variety of media, styles and scales, it somehow manages to maintain an ineffable balance. The influence of Clemente can be felt in some of the earlier expressionist works and recent works on paper, while the 'Pixel' series suggests a kind of Cubism for the digital age.

His work as a filmmaker cross-pollinates in subtle, oblique ways. The idea of pixel paintings came to him when working with digital images. "It was a discovery. We may have been seeing this way unconsciously since human beings had eyes, but now that we know we can zoom in on something, and then zoom out and see the whole picture, it becomes an awareness we can use to appreciate the pixilated version. Kind of like a primal, pre-conscious experience that relates to the era of technology."

Some of the larger canvases have a vital, explosive energy -- the large pixels radiating outward rhythmically, like a waltz, suggest a reserved spontaneity. At the center there is calm, control, and powerful emotion. They can be puzzle-like, with a trompe-l'oeuil quality. Figures or shapes disguised within...

Los Angeles Times Feature September 20,2007

Lederle's painting as featured at Laurie Frank's House.

The Book Los Angeles Fall Winter 2001
'Multimedia-Mann'

BY Stephen Siciliano

Hermann Lederle believes in cultivating craft; lots of them. The word "painter" does not adequately decribe this native of Mannheim, Germany, whose work spans a number of genres. His apprenticeship was done at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied film, the first artistic bow in his quiver. He painted in SoHo, at the height of its 80s glory, and when that world lost its edge, came west and found work as a production designer. At Lederle's Blackbox Studio space in Hollywood, canvas, keyboard and printer are all within reach...

Press

ImageBlog Huffington Post March 2013

BY David K PressmanHermann Lederle's work is a combustion of personal force and integrity translated into layers of rich, deep and unexpected shapes and colors. His works is arresting and thought provoking, allowing our eyes to capture nuances of texture and depth again and again. Lederle brings to his work a path of unexpected freedom for the viewer whether it is his works on paper or his large canvases that dominate a space without pretense.

Frank Pictures Gallery Exhibition April 2012

Hermann Lederle

Footprints on Snow

April 3 – April 27, 2012

Frank Pictures Gallery announces Footprints on Snow, the gallery’s third solo exhibition of artist Hermann Lederle.

Lederle’s work has a 3-D, almost architectural reality, achieved without employing geometry. He creates a progression of inner space expanse that the paintings invite you to enter as an explorer evoking the thrilling sensation of stepping on virgin ground.

Frank Pictures Gallery Exhibition July 2005

Paintings by Hermann Lederle

Frank Pictures Gallery, Bergamot Station
July 23 - August 2, 2005

Hermann Lederle's new show of his paintings at Frank Pictures Gallery is a body of selected works from 1987 to the present.

Though the blizzard of paint, Lederle evolves the history of his art: the quick charcoal life drawings of his years at the San Francisco Art Institute, their transformation into his blurred oil stick paintings...

Court Gallery Exhibition April 1986

Court Gallery
61 Sullivan Street, New York N.Y. 10012
April 26- 11 May, 1986

Introduction by John Gavin

In this, his first solo exhibition, curated in New York by the Court Gallery and in San Francisco by the Lawson Galleries, Lederle offers a series of figurative paintings whose narrative is both personal and transpersonal, and suggests both relation and conflict. And there are, from a painterly point of view, observable references to the early German Expressionists in this young painter's gesture and sensibility...

Reinpfalz Ludwigshafen Germany July 7th, 1987

'Die Isolation der Menschheit'

Paintings by Hermann Lederle

Solo Exhibitions

HPH Galerie - Echterdingen, Germany 2017
Vertiva - Stuttgart 2015
Arthea Galerie - Mannheim 2015
Arthea Galerie Art KA 2014 - Germany
Frank Pictures Gallery Bergamot Station - Santa Monica 2012
Alicia Armstrong Gallery - Palm Desert Feb 2011
Copal Fine Art Gallery - Palm Desert 2010
Frank Pictures Gallery Bergamot Station - Santa Monica 2005
Solaris Gallery - Los Angeles 2005
Black Box - Los Angeles 2003
Media Rare Gallery - Los Angeles 2001
Paris Photo Lab - Los Angeles 2001
Orson Studio - Los Angeles 1999
Café American - San Francisco 1987
Alte Gutselfabrik - Frankenthal.Germany 1987
Lawson Galleries - San Francisco 1986
The Court Gallery - New York 1986

Group Exhibitions

Stangl Showroom - Berlin 2021
Art Karlsruhe 2020 - HPH SERIGRAPHY
Leinfelden-Echterdingen City Hall - Germany 2018
Release und Kunst Stuttgart 2018
HPH Galerie - Echterdingen, Germany 2018
Bege Galerie 'HPH Serigraphs' - Ulm, Germany 2018
Apparent Opposites - Hollywood 2017
Flower Hewes - Malibu 2015
Art Karlsruhe - Germany 2013
Arthea Galerie - Mannheim 2013
gGallery LA - Santa Monica 2012
Copal Fine Art - Palm Desert 2010
M.V.P.A. - Los Angeles 2002
ConTempory WelFare - Los Angeles 2001
Schroeck-Schmidt Gallery - Neckargemuend.Germany 2000
Seed Foundation House Of Blues - Los Angeles 1999
Friedman Guinness Gallery - Heidelberg.Germany 1991
Ivey Gallery - Los Angeles 1989
Emerging Collectors Gallery - Paris.France 1987
Emerging Collectors Gallery - New York 1987
San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art Gallery - 1987
Contemporary Museum Gallery - Budapest.Hungary 1986
International Art Fair - Montreal.Canada 1986
Diego Rivera Gallery - San Francisco 1984
Goodman Gallery - San Francisco 1983
Diego Rivera Gallery - San Francisco 1982

Collections

Laurie Frank - Media Rare Gallery, Los Angeles
Esther Friedman - Friedman Guiness Gallery
John Gavin - The Court Gallery, New York
Carla Baird & David Crane - Lawson Galleries, San Francisco
Ringo Starr - Los Angeles
Eric Stoltz - Los Angeles
Dr. Eugenia & Dieter Bazlen - Lucerne, Switzerland
Jeff Ayerhoff - Virgin Records, Los Angeles
Juergen Schreiber - Kunsthandel Mannheim
Walter Channing - CW Group New York
John Houck - New York
Susan Swig - Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco
Desi Hoffmann - Hoffmann Concerts Germany
Dariusz Wolski - Malibu
Rika & Tony Broccoli - Los Angeles
Leslie Libman & Larry Williams - Los Angeles
Peggy Knickerbocker - San Francisco
Martin Schaer - Montana
Hiro Lizars - Los Angeles
Gabor Csupo - Los Angeles
Regierungs Präsidium Stuttgart, Germany
Felix Kam Chung & Thom Bissett - Los Angeles
Matthew P. Wagner - Los Angeles
Ian Kimbrey & Joanne Forchas - Los Angeles
Jerilynn Hanson - Thymes Minneapolis
Natalie Hill - Los Angeles
MJ Carlyle & Co - Los Angeles
Gerhard Schmidt Ferry - Hamburg
Robert Molnar - New York
Dr. Rosy Knoll - Heidelberg, Germany
Brad Elterman - Los Angeles
Valerie & Ron Slim - Dana Point
Bela Kerek - Budapest, Hungary
Thomas Kraft - Wiesloch, Germany
Lois Linden - Los Angeles
Marilyn Heston, MHA Media - Los Angeles
Susan Velez - Beverly Hills
Lee-Hwa Wang - San Francisco
Karen Winston - Malibu
William Pickering - San Francisco
Regina & Wolfgang Chur - Stuttgart, Germany
Alicia & Ernest Armstrong - Palm Desert
Fraser Ross - Kitson, Los Angeles
Corliss Mueller - Germany
Christie Burton - Santa Monica
Cecilia Leung - San Francisco
Tina Weise - Mannheim
James Ugboma - Los Angeles
Nils Anderson - Mannheim, Germany
Ashkahn Motamen - Los Angeles
David K. Haspel - Santa Monica
Cathy Foyle - Malibu
Christian Koell - Hotel Olympia, Obergurgle Austria
Dr. Nick Frischmuth - Stuttgart
Tina Broccoli - Malibu
Petra Borrmann & Walter Shirm - Stuttgart
Klaus Eisert - Phoenix Contact
Nancy Tseng - Saratoga

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