Face #60, Series Transparency Painting

What constitutes a human being if one "liberates" him from the characteristics of gender and race as well as from the common ideals of beauty, from references to the temporally contextual environment and any concrete narratives? It is this question that Monika Lehmann's art raises. An important question about the principles of our substantial, bare "humanity", about the core of our being. The artistic realization of the purely anthropomorphic expression in the form of a face as a surface, which the artist offers in her current works, is an utopian representation of human nature. From the anonymous portraits she draws a multitude of different characters, which, sometimes tender and fragile, sometimes melancholic and loving, radiate depth and emotions from within and touch the viewer positivly. The utopian and ethereal nature of these beings manifests itself consciously or unconsciously in the formal implementation in the language of painting. The lightness is obvious, as if the canvases and colours together with the protagonists of the picture appear lucid and schematic. No tangible contours and outlines, even the dark shades possess transparency. Individual portraits or figures appear on the mostly light background of the pictures like blurred, dynamic-harmonious compositions. This fact, however, does not alter the strong presence of the faces portrayed. Often dark-edged, large eyes convey an expression of the inner life through the gaze and are reminiscent of the well-known Fayum portraits, in which the emphatically large, speaking eyes were depicted as "mirrors of the soul". The artist works with acrylic paints, pigments and various stains. A previous sketch and a first concept are created before each painting, yet the artist leaves much to coincidence in the painting process. All paintings are created in several layers, which merge into each other and on top of each other. The artist understands this process both symbolically and ritually, namely as an inverted skinning or application of the individual surface to the quintessence of every human being, which is so difficult to name.