Cordelia Lehmann-Reinthaller
Österreich | 23 Kunstwerke im online-Depot
Tradition is not the keeping of ashes, but the passing on of the flame.
Thomas More
Characteristics and CV
Vienna, 1959: Cordelia Lehmann-Reinthaler was born here - a painter, ceramicist and an artist who understands the nature of transformation. Her work resembles a quiet revolution: using clay and fire, ink and oil, she tells stories of ruptures, new beginnings and the courage to trust the uncontrollable.
Raku is at the heart of her work. A traditional Japanese technique in which ceramics are fired at high temperatures and removed from the kiln while red-hot. Fire, smoke, ash and cooling create surfaces that are as rough as they are fragile - full of unique structures, deep marks and unexpected colors. Here, in this moment between improvisation and control, Lehmann-Reinthaler finds her artistic truth, creating incomparable contemporary documents. They speak of crises, of vulnerability and of the power that arises in moments of uncertainty.
Her specially constructed raku kiln, embedded in the studio in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, is not just a tool, but also a place of ritual. Here, clay becomes history, fire becomes language, smoke becomes an invisible co-author.
Raku
But Cordelia Lehmann-Reinthaler doesn't just work with clay and flames. On paper, she creates fragile worlds with felt-tip pens, ink and oil that move between abstraction and figuration. Here, the works tell of inner spaces, of moods and reflections that cannot be put into words. Letters dance next to lines, shapes blur into thoughts.
And yet raku remains at the heart of her work. For her, it is more than a technique - it is an attitude. One that embraces the imperfect, that understands failure as part of the process and finds beauty in the unpredictable.
Lehmann-Reinthaler does not preserve ashes, she carries the flame on. Her art does not follow a rigid path, but resembles a dynamic process in which new things emerge and old things shine in a new light. I her art oscillates between the tranquillity of centuries-old tradition and the dynamism of modern forms of expression.
Why BURN-IN
With the works of Cordelia Lehmann-Reinthaler, BURN-IN gains an artistic position that is characterized by its uncompromising individuality and its deep roots in the raku tradition. Her art embodies a fascinating mixture of wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of the beauty of imperfection, and the filigree art of kintsugi, in which breaks are not concealed but emphasized with gold. Her sculptures show the acceptance of imperfection as an aesthetic principle that is both poetic and powerful. The polarity of control and chance, of material and fire, of creation and destruction becomes a sensual experience in Lehmann-Reinthaler's work. Her works manage to slow the viewer down, to enter into a dialog with the material and to read the stories that smoke and flames have left behind. They fit harmoniously into BURN-IN's GreenART program, in which sustainability is a fundamental message and a living artistic principle.
The inclusion of Cordelia Lehmann-Reinthaler in BURN-IN's portfolio is also a powerful statement for an art that impresses with its diversity and depth. The works add a dimension to the gallery program that is both aesthetically fascinating and philosophically inspiring. In her ceramic compositions, apparent opposites merge into a harmonious unity: the raw meets the refined, the ephemeral meets the permanent. Her art presents fractures not as flaws, but as narratives of resilience and beauty - entirely in the spirit of the concept of scars of gold. This makes Lehmann-Reinthaler a central component of the gallery program, an artistic bridge between tradition and innovation. Her works embody the spirit of BURN-IN in a unique way and set an example of courage, depth and otherness.
online Depot
ALBERTA'S ART-FEATURE &
BURN-IN Ausstellungen
Cordelia Lehmann-Reinthaller uses her art to create a stage on which her created figures unite to form a personal world theater. The world of actors and musicians is close to her and forms the broad basis on which she develops her own artistic language. Her works are unique. She draws shapes and colors from her imagination and creates drawings, word pictures, paintings and, in the last twenty-five years, mainly sculptures in glazed ceramics and painted raku technique.
Although her art is serious, humor and sometimes irony cannot be overlooked. She succeeds in questioning tragic situations and facts and using her wit to defuse or expose them.
She appears level-headed and concentrated in her appearance, registers seismographically and creates her view of the world. The expressiveness of her actors is concentrated in their faces and heads. They are not shy and quiet. They are appealing, intriguing to disturbing, narrative, interpretative and, despite their rigid sculptural nature, alive.
Dr. Barbara Asboth, art historian (text excerpt from the book Sturm & Brand)
The painter and ceramicist Cordelia Lehmann-Reinthaller was born in Vienna in 1959, worked for several years as a TV presenter and later as an assistant to Prof. Oskar Luksics. The artist was a guest student at the Vienna Film Academy, studied theater studies at the University of Vienna, acting at the Krauss acting school and then architecture at the Vienna University of Technology. Marriage to chamber actor Fritz Lehmann in 1981 and several stage design projects.
From 1987, exhibitions in Austria, Italy and Great Britain. After the death of her husband in 1999, Lehmann-Reinthaller turned to ceramics and studied in Cord sur Ciel (France) with a renowned ceramist. An expedition to Mongolia followed in 2009. In 2017, the artist was a wanderer between worlds ... and was allowed to stay.
From 2018, she created her first raku works. The book Sturm und Brand will be published in 2021. Author Barbara Asboth.
The artist lives and works in Vienna and Kamptal.