Curatorial Statement "Hyperfemina"
Hyperfemina is an unapologetic study in constructed femininity, where the subject becomes both icon and interrogator. Drawing from the aesthetics of post-pop eroticism, Othmar Lehner’s series foregrounds the labor of self-stylization in a saturated visual economy. The body is not merely posed; it is performed—architected through gesture, gaze, and exaggerated artifice.
The influence of fashion editorial conventions is not incidental but instrumental. High heels, lingerie cutouts, mirror angles, glossy skin: all are deployed not for allure but for amplification. Lehner’s subject is not demure nor passive; she enacts a hyperbolic femininity that verges on the uncanny. With eyes sharpened into vectors and lips lacquered into signals, she becomes a recursive image: a woman performing “woman” under aesthetic pressure.
Yet within this choreographed hyperreality, fractures appear. The mirror exposes more than it reflects. The gesture nearly falters. The color saturation, while pristine, borders on claustrophobic. In this tension lies the work’s critical valence: Hyperfemina is not about seduction—it is about saturation, spectacle, and the exhaustion of the gaze.
What emerges is a portrait of post-authenticity, where identity is neither naturalized nor rejected, but iterated, rehearsed, and ultimately unmasked as artifice. This is femininity after the algorithm—aware, self-curated, and weaponized by its own aesthetics.
List of Photos at Saatchi with Links
