Simon Lehner

🏁 Happy to announce my first solo show @kowberlin titled „My Mountain has no summit“ with 9 new works including an animatronic sculpture and a large scale video installation. Running from 18.11 - 27.1.2024 Standing ovation goes to the one and only number one assistant @henrirehling , @benchrst , @annakreinecker , Jacob & Simon @the.patch.music from 3D Kunst for the great partnership with the sculptures and the whole team @kowberlin See you Saturday 🏁 🎥 Footage by @henrirehling #kowberlin #soloshow #simonlehner

📍Happy to share some glimpses from my first solo show @kowberlin titled “MY MOUNTAIN HAS NO SUMMIT”. Running until 27.1.2024 “To call Simon Lehner’s pictures paintings is to understand them as compositions in the classical sense and, sometimes, style, often painted on wood, although they transpose the genre and its techniques into the digital age. Lehner harnesses AI tools to generate his motifs out of private and collective visual archives. He paints them together with a robot, his hand and the machine’s meeting over the canvas. His compositional skill and eye for color are unmistakable. What’s crucial for his pictorial conceptions is his grasp of traumatic structures—memory loops, panicked distortions of reality, losses of information and context—which he deftly translates into aesthetic forms.” - Excerpt from the accompanying exhibition text by @alexander.koch.kow Slides 1: Echo Figure (Grey Matter Cycle II), 2023 3-5: Safe crash I (Iteration I), 2023 6-7: Auto – Icon (Iteration II), 2023 8-9: Worldfamouz, 6 channel video Installation, 2023 10: Image Basterds VIII, 2023 Photos by Ladislav Zajac Videos by Simon Lehner #kowberlin #simonlehner #soloshow

Open until 24.2.2024 @kowberlin ‘MY MOUNTAIN HAS NO SUMMIT‘ Enjoy this walk trough the show 🏁 — #simonlehner #kowberlin

Simon Lehner presents his animatronic sculpture ‘Echo Figure (Grey Matter Cycle)’ (2023), which delves into the concept of ‘shared data trauma’ – the condition shaped by algorithmic echo chambers and the flood of images in the digital age. Referencing engrams, the physical traces of memory in the brain, Lehner uses advanced digital processes and his own photographic archive to animate fragmented memories. Echo Figure becomes a haunting manifestation of how personal and collective histories are distorted and reanimated in a world driven by digital overload. The body of work builds on Lehner’s debut UK solo exhibition ‘Of Peasants & Basterds’ at Edel Assanti (June – August 2025) and precedes the publication of a monograph by Spector Books (Leipzig, Germany), accompanying his solo exhibition ‘Clean Thoughts. Clean Images’ at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN (March – June 2025). DM us for more information on Simon’s works. @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #SimonLehner #Frieze #FriezeLondon

Just over one week left to see 'Of Peasants & Basterds' – the UK debut solo exhibition of Vienna-based artist Simon Lehner. The exhibition concludes with 'White Knight II (End of the Road)' (2025), a powerful summation of the 'white knight' figure – a symbol of today's young men who imagine themselves as defenders against the liberal values of Western society. In this final work, the knight wears medical shoe covers, suggesting he has completed his task and is now carefully concealing his tracks. Lehner also nods to his earlier 'peasant paintings' through the digitised use of Bruegel’s colour palettes across the canvas. On view through 22 August 2025. 🎥 @dorevenchen @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #SimonLehner Simon Lehner, 'White Knight II (End of the Road)', 2025. © Simon Lehner. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti. Photo by @tomcarterldn .

We are delighted to announce Edel Assanti’s representation of Simon Lehner, following his first UK solo exhibition with the gallery, '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. Lehner’s interest in internet subcultures emerges from a desire to better understand his own psychology and childhood experiences. His research probes algorithm-driven echo chambers and how they evolve into mainstream social doctrines. Lehner’s films and paintings are created through a unique process: he aggregates thousands of images from both personal and internet-sourced archives to construct dynamic avatars in interactive digital environments. His paintings emerge through a collaboration with a modified robotic router, creating topographic surfaces that are disrupted by painterly gestures where the artist’s hand and the machine’s meet. Emblematic of the era in which they are made, the outcome of Lehner's sophisticated layering eludes the binary of truth versus falsehood; how works relay how pixels extend and transfer into physical space; and how digital images, even when fictitious, are physical facts. Lehner is co-represented by @kowberlin in Germany. 📸 @maximilian_pramatarov @simon_lehner #SimonLehner #EdelAssanti

Through ‘Of Peasants & Basterds’, Simon Lehner’s UK debut exhibition, the 'white knight' motif emerges repeatedly as a potent symbol. In 'White Knight I' (2025), the figure represents today's young men – particularly those within incel and manosphere subcultures – who cast themselves as warriors defending against the liberal impulses of Western society. Lehner's work melds personal and collective archival imagery with 3D environments and robotic-painterly processes to trace how these images propagate toxic ideals of hyper‑masculinity and distort identities within algorithm-driven echo chambers. On view through 22 August 2025. @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #SimonLehner Simon Lehner, 'White Knight I', 2025. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti. Photo by @tomcarterldn .

In 'Radicalisation Study I' (2025), Simon Lehner turns his attention to the 'amygdala' – a small structure in the brain that governs emotional processing, particularly fear and aggression, and plays a key role in memory formation and emotional learning. The work forms part of Lehner’s new body of paintings in his UK debut solo exhibition, 'Of Peasants & Basterds', which interrogates the relationship between the image-onslaught of the information age and psychic inner life. In this piece, Lehner examines how the amygdala, though no longer essential for everyday survival, remains a primal structure actively exploited in the digital age – through clickbait headlines and hyper-stimulating content designed by tech and media oligarchs to provoke visceral emotional responses. With his signature blend of digital manipulation and painterly technique, Lehner interrogates how emotional triggers are embedded within visual culture, linking ancient biological instincts with the engineered stimuli of the information age. On view through 22 August 2025. 🎥 @dorevenchen @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #simonlehner Simon Lehner, 'Radicalisation Study I', 2025. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti. Photo by @tomcarterldn .

Throughout 'Of Peasants & Basterds', Simon Lehner draws on pop culture references from Hollywood films featuring toxic male icons – like Patrick Bateman from 'American Psycho' (2000). In 'Auto - Icon (Iteration III)' (2025), Simon portrays the stoic, misogynistic avatar as a real-life role model for incels. Hovering just above a bedroom floor, the figure symbolises men isolated in their homes, cut off from mainstream society and trapped in echo chambers. The rings around the figure’s joints mark where Simon controls its movements in the digital 3D programme developed by the artist. The composition is created using thousands of images aggregated from both Lehner’s private and collective archives. Within these environments, the artist assumes a puppeteer role, limitlessly manipulating his characters and props before translating them into films, animatronic sculptures or paintings. 🎥 @dorevenchen @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #SimonLehner Simon Lehner, 'Auto - Icon (Iteration III)', 2025. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti. Photo by @tomcarterldn .

Simon Lehner’s UK debut solo exhibition 'Of Peasants & Basterds' expands Lehner’s inquiry into the role of pictures to offer a deeper look at power and control, beginning with a reference to the history of painting. Inspired by paintings from the 16th to 19th centuries where kings commissioned "peasant paintings" of their kingdom’s ordinary people in idealised settings, Lehner's most recent work draws a parallel to the present day. Instead of kings, the figures of power in his works are a coterie of male tech CEOs whose surveillance tools generate an infinite datascape reflective of our collective psyche. And, in this analogy, the peasants are their users. The exhibition challenges the notion of "community", a term tech giants used in the early 2010s to feed utopian visions of a diverse, borderless society, with Lehner encouraging us to reconsider how the relentless image-saturation of the information age continue to shape society today. On view through 22 August 2025. 🎥 @dorevenchen @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #SimonLehner Simon Lehner, 'Peasant Painting II', 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti. Photo by @tomcarterldn .

Watch Simon Lehner discuss his first solo exhibition, ‘Of Peasants & Basterds’, at Edel Assanti. Lehner's exhibition interrogates the relationship between the image-onslaught of the information age and psychic inner life, probing algorithm-accelerated echo chambers as they evolve into mainstream social doctrines. 🎥 @dorevenchen @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #SimonLehner

A closer look at ‘community’... In ‘Of Peasants & Basterds’, Vienna-based artist Simon Lehner explores how tech giants like Meta and Twitter used the term ‘community’ in early 2010s marketing. Lehner’s work questions the authenticity behind these constructed online communities. He links corporate stock imagery to medieval ‘peasant paintings’ – idealised scenes commissioned by kings to project harmony and success. Today, similar visuals featuring curated diversity are used to attract users to digital platforms. Watch the video to learn more. 🎥 @dorevenchen @simon_lehner #EdelAssanti #SimonLehner