HERMANN LEDERLE

Hermann Lederle has pursued various forms and mediums of the arts. After graduating from Karl Friedrich School for humanist and classic studies, Hermann re-directed his career path. His early experiments in photography taught him a new sense of beauty and atmosphere and inspired him to further his education in painting, photography and filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute.

There, Hermann established his own visual language to express his multiple ideas and passion through the lens, on canvas and on the screen.

Lederle's paintings strive to wipe clean the slate of conventional notions of image construction. The latest series entails a two stage process, where at first 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 taking place within the canvases.

His works of art have been exhibited in various galleries in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Germany, Canada, Hungary and France. Hermann's paintings are in private collections of the Friedman Guinness Gallery Heidelberg Germany, Court Gallery New York, Lawson Galleries San Francisco, Media Rare Gallery Los Angeles and in the homes of Ringo Starr, Eric Stolz, Cal Zecca, Gabor Csupo. Hermann Lederle currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Recent exhibitions have taken place at Silverman Studio Hollywood 2017, Vertiva Stuttgart 2015, Arthea Galerie Mannheim 2015 and Frank Pictures Gallery Santa Monica 2012.

Education

San Francisco Art Institute
B.F.A. in Film & Fine Arts

Solo Exhibitions

HPH Galerie - Echterdingen, Germany 2017
Vertiva - Stuttgart 2015
Arthea Galerie - Mannheim 2015
Huffington Post
Arthea Galerie Art KA 2014 - Germany
Frank Pictures Gallery Bergamot Station - Santa Monica 2012
Huffington Post
Alicia Armstrong Gallery - Palm Desert Feb 2011
Copal Fine Art Gallery - Palm Desert 2010
Frank Pictures Gallery Bergamot Station - Santa Monica 2005
Solaris Gallery - Los Angeles 2005
Black Box - Los Angeles 2003
Media Rare Gallery - Los Angeles 2001
Paris Photo Lab - Los Angeles 2001
Orson Studio - Los Angeles 1999
Café American - San Francisco 1987
Alte Gutselfabrik - Frankenthal.Germany 1987
Lawson Galleries - San Francisco 1986
The Court Gallery - New York 1986

Group Exhibitions

Leinfelden-Echterdingen City Hall - Germany 2018
Release und Kunst Stuttgart 2018
HPH Galerie - Echterdingen, Germany 2018
Bege Galerie 'HPH Serigraphs' - Ulm, Germany 2018
Apparent Opposites - Hollywood 2017
Flower Hewes - Malibu 2015
Art Karlsruhe - Germany 2013
Arthea Galerie - Mannheim 2013
gGallery LA - Santa Monica 2012
Copal Fine Art - Palm Desert 2010
M.V.P.A. - Los Angeles 2002
ConTempory WelFare - Los Angeles 2001
Schroeck-Schmidt Gallery - Neckargemuend.Germany 2000
Seed Foundation House Of Blues - Los Angeles 1999
Friedman Guinness Gallery - Heidelberg.Germany 1991
Ivey Gallery - Los Angeles 1989
Emerging Collectors Gallery - Paris.France 1987
Emerging Collectors Gallery - New York 1987
Contemporary Museum Gallery - Budapest.Hungary 1986
International Art Fair - Montreal.Canada 1986
Diego Rivera Gallery - San Francisco 1984
Goodman Gallery - San Francisco 1983
Diego Rivera Gallery - San Francisco 1982

Essay

Adaptation by James Scarborough

Hermann Lederle’s “Adaptation,” 2015, is massive. Measuring five and a half feet by ten feet, this totemic monument doesn’t just envelop you, it anchors you to the ground. Reminiscent of partially open Levelor blinds, a network of dense and narrow vertical bands sweep across the canvas. There’s more weight at the center; this makes the surface quiver and shimmer, like water burbling over an outcropping of coral just beneath the surface of a roiling sea. Without fully revealing it, the piece suggests an expanse of pictorial depth. It accommodates something that is turbulent and veiled, expressionistic and controlled. This balance suggests a mystery, a conundrum, a koan.

You read it up and down, down and up, systematically working your way across. A crescendo from left to right, a climax at the middle, and then a denouement until the right edge. Structurally it’s the painterly equivalent of Guillaume Apollinaire’s pictorial poem, “Il Pleut,” from his 1918 book, Calligrammes. The lines of the poem are vertical, to simulate falling rain that evokes memories of women in the poet’s life...
HUFF POST ARTS 8.29.2015

Reviews

Huffington Post April 16, 2012 'Footprints on Snow'

Imagine Claude Monet's pastel Poplars... if Monet was working 100 years later and spent a lot of time on the internet... and you get somewhere close to the work of Hermann Lederle. -- ( PDF)

The German painter, who now resides in Los Angeles, gives impressionism a contemporary inflection. Where before wispy brushstrokes and springtime hues ruled, Lederle works in the colors and shapes of our time. His paintings have an edge to them and an electric energy pulsing throughout. Lederle creates his 3-D effect by first painting with a traditional brush and then reworking it with a painter's knife, giving the paint a contradictory texture.

Lederle's paintings capture how it feels to see in the modern world. Waterlilies are replaced with welcome screens and rolling sunsets with flashing advertisements. But there is a beauty to this contemporary image of seeing, even if it is a little sharp around the edges.

Art Knowledge News April 4, 2012 'Footprints on Snow'

Lederle's paintings continue to evolve with dense color expanses woven into heavily textured line structures. The latest series entails a two-stage process, where at first a graduated color is applied with a traditional 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 taking place within the canvases. "Lederle’s work has a 3-D, almost architectural reality," says gallerist Laurie Frank, "achieved without employing geometry. He creates a progression of inner space expanse that the paintings invite you to enter as an explorer evoking the thrilling sensation of stepping on virgin ground."

The Book Los Angeles Fall Winter 2001
'Multimedia-Mann'

BY Stephen Siciliano

Hermann Lederle believes in cultivating craft; lots of them. The word "painter" does not adequately decribe this native of Mannheim, Germany, whose work spans a number of genres. His apprenticeship was done at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied film, the first artistic bow in his quiver. He painted in SoHo, at the height of its 80s glory, and when that world lost its edge, came west and found work as a production designer. At Lederle's Blackbox Studio space in Hollywood, canvas, keyboard and printer are all within reach.He paints fish on canvas and then makes those fish swim in cyberspace. Lederle's artbullet.com gives an idea of how this Glocal (globally-local) multi-mediast samples himself, creating collages of commercials, short films, painting and (a)tonal compositions. These days he's painting "pixilated" canvases. "They are representative of the extreme disorientation of decadence humanity is going through thanks to digital technology," he says. "The picture isn't fully focused, but you can see the outline." And he's working on a pilot called "Hollywood Road", a truly "unscripted" reality screed, tracking the progress of several aspiring young actors. It's about transcending the borders of different artisticmedia.

Reinpfalz Ludwigshafen Germany July 7th, 1987 'Die Isolation der Menschheit'

Artweek San Francisco October 1986 'A Touch Of Chicanery'

BY James Scarborough

Hermann Lederle's new work at Lawson Galleries perfectly illustrates Jose Orega y Gasset's contention in The Modern Theme that art, along with culture, reason and ethics, must enter the service of life. Ortega y Gasset prescribes, among other things, an art that is spontaneous, athletic and imbued with vitality; he finds it most apt that modern public history began on a tennis court in France.

Ortega y Gasset discerns a one-sided tendency in modern European history, the intellectual heritage into which Lederle, a German, was born. Here, there was a separation of culture and life as art distanced itself from the spontaneous life of the person considering it and acquired a consistency of its own: culture thereby became objective, set up in opposition to the subconscious that engendered it (this conceit informs a large part of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things). Culture, says Ortega Y Gasset, survives only when those who make art and those who view it inject it with a constant flow of vitality. Pictorially this can be illustrated by the difference in conception between the work of Lederle and his contemporaries Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Palladino...

Article

Image System August 2003

BY Mia Taylor

"What interests me is not just the complete picture, but a minute detail or a particular interaction which has to do with how an individual sees the world. Knowing what happened in the past and then projecting the future, you suspend yourself in that moment of time"

Hermann Lederle's work is not easy to categorize. Encompassing a variety of media, styles and scales, it somehow manages to maintain an ineffable balance. The influence of Clemente can be felt in some of the earlier expressionist works and recent works on paper, while the 'Pixel' series 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 came to him 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."

Some of the larger canvases have a vital, explosive energy -- the large pixels radiating outward rhythmically, like a waltz, suggest a reserved spontaneity. At the center there is calm, control, and powerful emotion. They can be puzzle-like, with a trompe-l'oeuil quality. Figures or shapes disguised within the painting are not at first apparent, but once seen cannot be unseen. Figures float to the surface and then sink back.

The process for his works on canvas involves a series of intricate layers, often using gold leaf, and oil paint incorporated with wax. There are, what he calls, three layer states: the conceptual starting point, the emotional, and then the unifying stage. The wax medium renders the paint transparent, allowing him to paint layer upon layer...

Recent Exhibition

Lederle ~ Arthea Gallery 2015

Arthea Galerie

Lederle ~ Art Karlsruhe 2014

Art Karlsruhe

Lederle ~ Art Karlsruhe 2013

Art Karlsruhe

Lederle ~ Arthea Galerie 2013

Arthea Galerie

Lederle ~ Footprints on Snow, 2012

Frank Pictures Gallery

Los Angeles Times Feature

Lederle's painting as featured at Laurie Frank's House, September 20th 2007.

Los Angeles Times Home Section