Anna Klinkhammer, the painter Andrea Lehmann has filled a small closet with paintings – even on the ceiling – which simulate a cosmos reminiscent of a stage set. The small room is the heart of her exhibition “Stuffed Diamonds.” In the vein of pulp magazines bearing science fiction, gothic or fantasy covers, the thirty-year-old artist portrays a laboratory in which a young photographer focuses in on aliens. Her medium has tied her to a chair. The aliens’ huntress appears with a camera before her face amidst a display of stuffed birds, deer, branches and poisonous mushrooms.Andrea Lehmann’s Diamant Technik presents a dream-like adventure scene broadcasting both individual and collective desire. Sourcing her material from the internet, as well as her own imagination, Lehmann draws on the style of Japanese animation to encompass an exotic blend of kitsch naiveté and hyper-real sophistication. Translated through painting, Lehmann’s heroic tableau confuses the intimate and the monumental, creating a gushy sentimentality at odds with its computerised origins and awesome scale. Often basing her figures on her own likeness, Lehmann’s paintings become virtual projections of psychological territories, authoring personal identity as alter ego, constructed through the mesmerising and precarious beauty of media saturation.

Andrea Lehmann’s figurative alter egos navigate precarious netherworlds where media and myth combine in fantastical landscapes described as “ultramodern soul mirrors”. Sourcing her material from the internet, as well as her own imagination, Lehmann’s collaged compositions execute girl-power fantasy as ostentatious, larger than life, and hopelessly sentimental. Conceiving her paintings as a form of storytelling, Lehmann’s Diamant Technique draws on the style of Japanese animation to encompass an exotic blend of kitsch innocence and hyper-real sophistication. Working in massive scale, Lehmann broadcasts individual fantasy as collective desire, authoring her escapism with ironic naiveté mimicking the irrepressible jubilance of folk murals and Bollywood billboards.Andrea Lehmann can spell out her girlish myths motif by motif to make a story. More than anything, the shimmering giant crystal and the horrible jellyfish arm or black vampire blood are elements of virtuoso painting that uses photo-realism, abstract color progression, extreme perspectives and classic composition to effortlessly produce a thrilling drama.