ADAPTATION
BY HERMANN LEDERLE
BY HERMANN LEDERLE
PAINTING
SEPTEMBER 2015
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.
ADAPTATION DREAM 2015
The piece began with marks on the canvas. His signature, in the lower corner; Words near the edge, vertically arrayed. Given the piece’s up and down rhythm, it invites a comparison. 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 so that the original marks show through as interstices of the canvas. Punctuated with a stop and go rhythm, the work reigns in the artist’s prior spontaneous flourishes. Each scrimmed line brims with its own gravity. Overall it packs a powerful existential wallop.
ARTHEA GALLERY MANNHEIM GERMANY 2015