Biography

Chelsea Lehmann is a painter living and working on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. Over the past two decades she has exhibited widely and received numerous awards, grants and international residencies. Her practice explores the relationship between painting, drawing and historical forms of representation, investigating how images persist, mutate and acquire new meanings across time and culture.

Working primarily in oil paint, Lehmann’s paintings frequently employ layered surfaces that allow earlier traces of work to remain visible, creating a dialogue between memory, materiality and representation. Recent projects draw on ideas of the para-pastoral and Australian Gothic, examining how landscape can function as a site of cultural memory, psychological projection and human experience. Moving between observation and invention, her work combines fragments of figuration, landscape and historical imagery to explore uncertain relationships between people, place and history. Lehmann holds a PhD from UNSW Art & Design (2019) and is also an educator and researcher.