walking
deutsch / english
Publications
Art tape
Artist: Bernhard G. Lehmann
Texts: Uwe Lempelius, François Maher Presley, Marion Janet Deike
Photos: Peter Rathmann, Michael Ruff, Lutz Jarré, Bernhard G. Lehmann
Continuous edition, 25.6 x 22 cm, ring binder, illustrated in color, 160 consecutive pages
Price: 27.00 EUR | Available from the Atelier Bernhard G. Lehmann.
from the content
The book 'walking' is a collection of selected works by the painter and sculptor Bernhard G. Lehmann, an insight into his work over the past thirty years.
This first volume in ring binder format, which deals with the artist's work, has now been completed and contains numerous illustrations and text contributions, including by Francois M. Presley and a closing remarks by Prof. Heinz Spielmann.
from the content
Re-evolution
To the sculptures by Bernhard Lehmann
I encountered Lehmann's work for the first time in an environment that held it very unreal, an environment devouring it with its rich colors, on a lawn, framed by trees and bushes, a framework that - as is often the case with the fine arts - the work around the it actually works, captivates, cramped it, gave it a completely different expression, in front of a house, in front of a gallery in Hamburg.
Almost with dignity, they surrendered to the "capture": The reddish shimmering, massive Iranian travertine seemed to float over the grass, caused by the metals growing from it; The steel rods, like raindrops in a row, moved in the wind, touched each other, made sounds, irregular and yet with a very calming regularity in the long run, which quickly changed for the viewer and listener from an artificially created to a natural component of the nature surrounding us Developed a world of sound and images.
These bulky-looking and yet graceful objects, these untrue and yet existing objects, these unnatural and yet accompanying sounds seemed to me as if it were only about the contrast, as if the badly chosen place, the tribute, the art to the, was once again proving itself commercial reality has to pay tribute, actually a little contrary to its origin, as far as it is still recognized in our contemporary world, let alone can assert itself.
In front of me I saw a large white marble hall, a representative hall in a large office building, the asphalt in public space, thought Bernhard Lehmann's work in this environment, stately, generous, not complementing the space, dominating it, giving it a meaning in the first place , the continuation of natural forms, the noble perfection of the stone that has now become art, the perfection of the everyday movements of the blades of grass out in nature that we no longer pay attention to.
I felt the admiration when people stood up to the sculptures in these halls, whispering or in silence, recognized in their faces the associations they had with "Gate of Winds", "Blue Grass Music" or "Weite und Wersten", was silent on me her speechlessness in her thoughts, which I often encountered when people standing in front of natural wonders cannot grasp them.
All these thoughts led me back to the place where I saw Lehmann's work for the first time, in Hamburg, in a gallery, in the garden, framed by bushes and trees, on a lawn, the heavy, even massive stone, the earth, from which the steel, from which the stalks grow, into which the raindrops fall, the soft melody when the wind instrumentalizes things, the all-devouring colors, in which everything still exists, is given space to every life.
Don't Lehmann's works serve to complete what has lasted so long and from which they themselves have grown? Aren't they the exaggeration, because nature is not enough, the prototypes exhibited in large halls of what we want to imagine as the culmination of creation? Do they not serve the satisfaction of our aesthetic perception, simply standing there without a word and being beautiful?
Rather, I believe that they show us a part of our own development history, that it has its origin and a very strict order that arises from playing with the mystical number four (four cardinal points, four archangels, etc.) and with eight, twelve and sixteen is continued, first developing into a harmonious disorder, grasping the space, playing with the elements, also playing with the wind, the (rain) water, the sun and the sand (earth), despite the hardness of the material organic, to find their way back later, to be part of what they are from, back to earth, to time, to the origin, to the strict order mentioned at the beginning.
They reflect our sociology a little, we wander with them to past places, live what we have experienced anew, recognize unity in contradictions, in the compulsion of precisely this unity also to be able to move freely, learn something about the space in which we want it we wish, evolving from the permanent, simply aimlessly instead of being born into it. Hamburg, in 1994, François Maher Presley
Space from the spirit of music
Some subjective comments on the work of Bernhard G. Lehmann
Some of Bernhard G. Lehmann's objects form a structure that is reminiscent of sheet music, but they do not correspond to the order of an obbligate, blank sheet music. The number of parallel wires changes from a few - about two or three - and increases to an amount that is impossible to grasp at first glance, they form into arcs, into rhythmically structured lines, they swing, only held firmly at one end, in the free space and end in ends of the same or different lengths. They arouse the idea of being able to produce, sound or hum tones, they resemble a music evoked by the room. Similar structures can be found in some of the artist's drawings from 2001; they are typically titled “Musical Hike”.
The fact that Hans Werner Henze, who visited the artist in his Rendsburg studio, was taken with this art seems almost taken for granted, if not accidental. Before the composer asked him to work for his garden, the painter and sculptor had taken the first step towards the encounter. After reading Henze's memoirs "Travel songs with Bohemian fifths" and after listening to a collection of Henze's music that was published on his 70th birthday, he gave him a piece of work entitled "Let's talk about music". The reaction to this came with Henze's wish to get a larger work for his garden near Rome. The creation of this work documents a small bibliophile treasure; it describes the development of the idea, its concept and its realization in words that also describe the closeness to the music. There is talk of associations with a ballet, of "three movements" with which the three elements, which exist independently of one another but are composed as a unit, are described. Visually, this division is communicated as calm and static, but also as movement and dynamics, as a technical-artificial form next to and in the life of the nature formed by the garden. The thin, dark branches of the tree standing next to it respond to the freest possible precision of the shining steel strings, their black drawing corresponds to the light lines of the wires attached to the arch, and the sky above the gray garden wall is reflected in the metal surfaces with which the wires are attached being held.
Music and the visual arts have long been closely related, although they target other senses. Kandinsky's theories, the experiments of the composer and painter Ciurlionis, and Goethe's statement about architecture as music turned into stone are often quoted as evidence of the parallelism of music and visual arts. But the sources for such an idea go back much further, for example to the theory of proportion, in which the artists of the Renaissance saw the aesthetic standard par excellence. This teaching transferred the steps of the scale to the harmonious proportions of rooms, figures and the structure of the images. The architect Leone Battista Alberti, when he described his three basic proportions based on Ficino's comment on Plato's “Timaeus”, of the “musical” proportion as the most harmonious. However, his judgment only took up what he knew from Plato, Plato from the Pythagoreans, who presumably had learned from the Indian Brahmins. From them, Buddha and the authors of his sutras also adopted the idea of the world order in the harmony of the spheres - their graphic representation, which we find on the lotus leaves of the great Buddha in Nara, shows the same parallel arcs of lines as the bent wires of the sculpture in Hans Werner Henze's garden. The fact that Bernhard G. Lehmann was elected an honorary member of the Azerbaijan Artists' Union, a country on the edge of the Silk Road along which the teachings of the Brahmins reached the west and east, fits in with these similarities in musical and artistic traditions that span millennia and continents. What seems so new and modern about Bernhard G. Lehmann's steel structures has a solid foundation, even if neither the sculptor nor the composer may be aware of this. Is it what is consciously put before the eyes or ears that gives art its meaning, or is it inheritance that is communicated as a matter of course? Hamburg, January 2006. Heinz Spielmann
