COURT GALLERY 1986

Hermann Lederle was born in Mannheim, Germany. Early humanist and classic studies there were followed by three years at the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied both film-making and painting. Lederle moved to New York in 1984.

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. There is restraint and pain in the observed moments of men and women who people these canvases. And there are, from a painterly point of view, observable references to the early German Expressionists in this young painter's gesture and sensibility.

In both style and content Lederle's early expression suggests a strong desire to communicate and the promise of mature articulation that will, in the future, come to be fully this painter's own.