Wendy Lehman
American, Born 1945
Born in California and raised in New York and Florida, Wendy Lehman taught herself painting and sculpture. She did not have a lot of contact with other artists. “My children were at school,’ she explained in an interview with Dujour magazine in 2012. “When they came home, I came home. I couldn’t go downtown and hang out and be tribal as I would have wanted to.” She produced her first work in 1964. It was a watercolor painting. She noted it in a ledger. In 1980 she transitioned to sculpture and in 1983 she held her first solo show, at the Kouros Gallery in New York. Today she works both in sculpture and in two-dimensional painting and drawing. Her work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Art, the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art in Buffalo, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. On her website she refers to herself as an intuitive artist. “My aim is to communicate with the viewer primarily on a subconscious level and secondarily an intellectual one. Generally I work in a series and only much later when the work is finished do I analyze the choices I made and try to discover why the work took the form it did and what the psychological or intellectual content might be.” Her sculptures, which are usually brightly colored, made of aluminum, and taller than a human, can be found outdoors in sculpture parks around the country. Each one, she explains, has its birth in small drawings -- “small line drawings of shapes.”