Simon Lehner: My Mountain Has No Summit

Simon Lehner’s first solo exhibition at KOW introduces the Vienna-based artist (b. 1996) with sculptures and a new cycle of paintings. Toxic models of masculinity, which Lehner has previously examined in a private and pop-cultural context, he now pursues further and in doing so is uncovers (self-)destructive psychologies that have long been collective in many societies.

The show opens with a classic family portrait. Drained of colour and slickly glossy, as though they had sprung from a 3D printer, father, mother, daughter and sons embody the non-soul of pseudo-documentary soaps and TikTok trends, those forms of everyday theater whose consumption rehearses the reproduction of the status quo. His protagonists look like avatars generated by media technology, identitarian stereotypes coursing through their veins like algorithms.

Yet as a tour of Lehner’s exhibition reveals, he isn’t interested in the well-known perversions of contemporary identity formation—his is a much more penetrating gaze into the psychology and physiology of the relevant—and impacted—protagonists, which may include us as well. As human consumables, as worn-down bodies, as wastage of self.

A human construct is lying on the floor in front of the family portrait. It is moving in a circle, second by second, dragging across the floor. A human watch hand, though one that indicates nothing beyond the painful attrition of the flesh in the uncompromising tick-tock of the norm.