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.

Rather than revealing which parts of ourselves are more animal, 'The Beast in Me' considers which parts of ourselves we have expelled in order to become more human. What makes these works transgressive is not their subject matter but how they collapse the border between human and animal, self and body, civility and instinct. The beast and the artist emerge from the same ungovernable place, each carrying the dread of what they might reveal; to create from this place is to set the animal loose.

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.

La Bête (2026) depicts a fox-like beast confronting a swan and her cygnets in a scene that moves between representation, abstraction and fable. The painting explores themes of predation, protection and uncertainty through an imagined encounter between animals. Set within a dreamlike landscape, the work draws on allegory and storytelling to consider the fragile balance between vulnerability, instinct and coexistence.