Los Angeles based German/American artist Hermann Lederle is known for his innovative BEAUTIFUL CHAOS abstract canvas scapes and unique BREAKAWAY layered PIXEL painting. Blurring the boundaries between paint-scape and landscape reality, and between the paint and its intended object, the work combines geometric abstraction and pure color concept to explore a new ethereal thematic. Through a PILLING of dotted lines and multitude of hyper-glow colors - as if the artist intends to assault the surface with micro-nuclear forces, Lederle constructs a next generation art-scape.
Lederle is most prominent for his PIXEL and OIL BLOTS painting and more recent ADAPTATION series. His works have shown in numerous exhibitions around the world, and his artistic production is particularly unique and recognizable. Although initially the impression is abstract, Lederle's works feature geometric elements that compose, as a whole, figurative elements, bringing to mind that of the abstract expressionists.
Upon graduating from Karl Friedrich School Mannheim for humanist and classic studies in Germany, Lederle re-directed his career path. His early apprenticeship training in photography inspired him to seek a formal continued education in the Fine Arts, namely filmmaking and painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.
San Francisco became his new residency for the next years until graduating with a BFA December 1983, followed by five years establishing himself as a painter in the thriving arts district of Tribeca in downtown New York City. It was there, Lederle began to formulate his own visual language to express his concepts and ideas through the lens, on canvas and on the film screen. Exemplifying the artist’s interest in the interaction between art and film and creating an additional link to 21st century web based digital art, Lederle's painting strives to wipe clean the slate of conventional notions of image construction.
Lederle's PIXEL series, first shown at Media Rare Gallery in Hollywood suggests a kind of Cubism for the digital age. His work as a filmmaker cross-pollinates in subtle, oblique ways. The idea of pixel paintings originated when working with digital images. “It was a discovery. We may have been seeing this way unconsciously since human beings had eyes, but now that we know we can zoom in on something, and then zoom out and see the whole picture, it becomes an awareness we can use to appreciate the pixilated version. Kind of like a primal, pre-conscious experience that relates to the era of technology."
Lederle's FOOTPRINTS ON SNOW series in 2012 entails a two stage process, where a graduated color is applied with a tractional brush allowing for the distinct qualities of its stroke to emerge. The second stage is executed with a painter's knife often with ostensibly contradictory linear shapes and lines, imbuing it with the properties of rival perceptions, irreversible like footprints, taking place within the canvases.
More recently since 2015, in his so-called ADAPTATION series, those vertical bands consist of the vivid and expressionistic decades-old paintings that Lederle has painstakingly hand-cut and then collaged onto the canvas, leaving just enough space for original marks to show through as interstices of the canvas. Punctuated with a stop and go rhythm, the work reigns in the artist’s prior unbidden flourishes and lays bare the source of artistic inspiration, simultaneously suggesting themes of evolution as they relate to Lederle's own practice and reflections on art history.
His latest works in submission on the occasion of IN SPRING Exhibition with VB Contemporary Gallery and concurrently with The BAG Gallery in 2024, recall the BLOTS-pointillism of the neoimpressionists. When purposely set against a SCHIENA SCURA - dark FOAM bubbles, the painting is calling out a messy, un-ordered free floating imagery of some scenery not quite in focus and frozen in a still frame, although its kinetic forces relentlessly pushing up against its limits. The experimental composition of primal shapes and lines striving for a creative expression of artificial, nearly molecular spaces in another dimension and direction. These images take time to absorb, asking you to invest and trust, not speed through in a frenzy. A new-dimensional structure slowly emerges transcending past traditional geometrics.
Hermann Lederle's work has been exhibited in the United States in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Canada, Germany, Italy, France and Hungary. A body of his work is in consignment at galleries, including Frank Pictures Gallery Santa Monica, DSV Kunstkontor Stuttgart, HPH Siebdruck Echterdingen Germany, Media Rare Gallery Los Angeles, Court Gallery New York, Lawson Galleries San Francisco, Friedman Guinness Gallery Heidelberg, and in private collections of Ringo Starr, Eric Stolz, Cal Zecca, Gabor Csupo.
Lederle lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Previous notable exhibitions took place at THE BAG Gallery Los Angeles 2024, M.A.D.S. Art Gallery ANDRENOCHROMO FOR DINNER Milan Italy 2022, ART KARLSRUHE HPH Special Serigraph Exhibition Germany 2020, Silverman Studio Hollywood 2017, Vertiva Stuttgart Germany 2015, Arthea Galerie Mannheim Germany 2015, Frank Pictures Gallery Santa Monica 2012, Solaris Gallery Los Angeles 2005, FP Gallery Los Angeles 2005, Media Rare Gallery Hollywood 2001, Lawson Galleries San Francisco 1986 and Court Gallery New York City 1986.
