Exhibition:
hortus ortus - Fabian Lehnert

The Leipzig artist Fabian Lehnert combines in his pictorial concepts and strategies our pleasure in viewing. He leads us into wondrous, fascinating plant worlds. Worlds populated by human and animal beings or hybrids. His preferred media are drawing and printmaking, although he also likes to leave the drawing page to work on larger surfaces. For the exhibition in the Biotechnikum of KWS he paints directly at the exhibition site.

The graphic oeuvre of the artist Fabian Lehnert also presents animal mountains, accumulations of animals, which in their composition seem as bizarre and disconcerting as the Bremen Town Musician Pyramid.

There is, for example, the sheet "Apteryx", in which a kiwi dominates the picture. Around the flightless bird, but especially on its back, numerous other birds are gathered: Rock-penguins, a reef-heron, the also flightless Kakapo belonging to the family of the parrots and even representatives of the already extinct run-birds Moa. All these animals are united by two things: Firstly, their habitat, because they are species that only occur in New Zealand. Secondly, the motif itself, because each individual animal is a copy that Lehnert takesfrom old encyclopedias from the 17th to 19th centuries.

Another sheet entitled "Tapirus Indicus" depicts the Malaysian fauna around tapir, porcupine, nose monkey and gibbon. But also native animal mountains get their appearance in the etching "Meles Meles" with badger, hedgehog, squirrel and red fox.

Since prehistoric times, the history and proliferation of mankind has been closely linked to the mass extinction of species¹, but the reception of the extinct dodo is particularly touching and romantic. Hardly a century after its discovery by humans, the animal became extinct. The trusting dodo had no natural predators on Mauritius and was therefore a particularly easy prey when hunting. Introduced rats, dogs and pigs did the rest and destroyed especially the eggs laid in ground nests.

The dodo's popularity, which continues to this day, was probably also due to its appearance in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.² And as magical as its appearance in Carroll's novel is, the image we have of this bird stems no less strongly from the imagination of artists who first formed the dodo based on oral and written records, then copied it from each other, drawing after drawing, thus creating over the centuries a rich and varied vocabulary of dodo forms. Only after skeletal finds, which are now shown as composite reconstructions in various natural history museums around the world, was the image of the dodo corrected.

¹ Harari, Juval, in: Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London 2014, S. 72-83.
² “At last the Dodo said, ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’”, in: Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, New York, S. 32 ff.

Lehnert's surreal-looking chimeras, half human, half animal beings, also emerge from the drawing and printing process. The strokes the artist makes while drawing suddenly look like the fur pattern of an animal and the human figure transforms into a hybrid being by itself. Over the years, this has resulted in a large number of prints in which Lehnert's observations of nature and his artistic imagination come together to create completely new creatures. These pictorial worlds are reminiscent of motifs by surrealist artists such as Odilon Redon or symbolist painters such as Fernand Khnopff. In the bird-like mixed creatures, one can even see similarities to Max Ernst's alter ego "Loplop", the birdlike mixed creature that repeatedly haunted the artist's works. In Fabian Lehnert's fairy-tale worlds of images, what is important to the artist is manifested in a particularly beautiful way: to unite his passion for nature and art.