Suspender is the first museum exhibition ever devoted to the work of Veronica Lehner (Cali, 1980). The artist conceived a site-specific installation for the atrium, the lower gallery, and the external space of MAMBO, activating an osmotic relationship between the inside and the outside of the institution. The exhibition reacts with the particular modernist architecture of the museum, proposing a destabilizing parcourse of ambiguity between the second and the third dimension.
Lehner’s research pushes the limits of painting, expanding the traditional notion of the canvas in both form and content. By merging painting with architecture and sculpture, she produces a physically immersive experience for the viewer through large-scale environments that work directly with the materiality of paint, unstrained by its support.
Lehner’s work is indicative of an attitude that can be defined as “expanded painting”, leaving the flat canvas to transform space and vice versa. By bypassing the traditional divisions of painterly elements like frame, paint and surface, the paintings become installation devices which emphasize their raw materiality.
Suspender challenges the relationship between a consciously produced painting and an accident. The suspended paint progressively stretches, donating a sense of impermanence and dynamism to the work that continues “to perform” during the whole duration of the exhibition, gradually altered by the tension embedded in the material itself.
By intertwining a fluid perception of color with the ordered hierarchy of painting, Lehner treats this medium as a palimpsest for uncanny installations of dreamy abandonment, humorous juxtaposition, and process-based quality. Through weaving layers imbued with an expressive immediacy, the work becomes a material record of its own making, beyond the artist’s plans.
Eugenio Viola