Curatorial Statement “White Noise (After Marilyn)”
In deliberate resonance with Bert Stern’s 1962 series In Bed with Marilyn, these photographs transpose the mythology of the reclining blonde into a soft-lit contemporary lexicon, where innocence and intention blur into one visual field. Yet while Stern's lens framed Monroe as both icon and casualty—caught between the performance of allure and its impending exhaustion—Lehner’s subject asserts a subtler agency, one embedded in the gaze, not the pose.
The high-key aesthetic, all whites and diffused contours, does not sanitize but suspends. The bed becomes a white void, a post-symbolic space where subjectivity is not dissolved but held in soft abeyance. Hair fans like a halo, eyes meet the lens not in seduction but in return. This is not the gaze of a muse, but of a woman mid-thought, mid-morning, mid-becoming.
In place of Monroe's tragic prefiguration, this work suggests another register—of ordinary transcendence. The white sheet does not conceal; it frames. What we see is not exposure, but a kind of trust. The erotics here are ambient, not staged; the subject is not captured, but simply present.
Where Stern’s series oscillated between celebration and mourning, White Noise withdraws from drama and instead cultivates a quiet ethic of presence. In doing so, it revises the bed not as a site of spectacle, but of ontology—where the self lies not in waiting, but in wakefulness.
List of Photos at Saatchi with Links
