Chelsea Lehmann

This work is part of Curatorial+Co.'s 2026 group exhibition, 'The Beast In Me'.

Of all the internal mechanisms that drive us, perhaps the most primordial is the beast. We expel the animal, the bodily, the base in favour of the intellect, yet it is the beast that holds what is most irreducibly human—impulses and desires that precede thought: love, rage, care, protection, connection. The very thing we suppress is also the thing that touches what is most vital.

Utilising dramatic formal contrasts and painterly gesture, Chelsea Lehmann emphasises the performativity and artifice of Baroque and surrealist bodies, echoing the way Western art has traditionally grafted constructs of feminine identity onto the illusions of representation itself. Lehmann’s work offers creative interventions which ‘undo’ these constructs by imaging the female form in conflict with painting’s weighty history and stable surfaces.