Natalie Lerner: Inheritor

839 is excited to announce “Inheritor,” the debut solo gallery exhibition from New York-based artist Natalie Lerner. The title “Inheritor” alludes to Lerner’s exploration of personal and cultural legacies, reflecting her role as both recipient and transmitter of memories, emotions, and artistic traditions. The show brings together several of the artist’s recent graphite and charcoal on paper works, which comprise the focus of her practice. 

Lerner’s process explores personal loss and examines societal notions of longing, yearning, and devotion. Her work serves as a form of active remembering and processing of grief. Inspired by a series of deaths among her late father’s friends in 2016, the artist began investigating symbolic imagery, drawing from mythology and personal experience to explore themes of passage and lineage. She has a growing interest in contemporary poetry, further informing her incorporation of visual language and her conceptual approach.

Lerner’s drawings, often unframed tondos ranging from twelve to fifty inches in diameter, frequently include depictions of recognizable objects like a mortar and pestle (“Preserves,” 2024) or a wishbone (“The Bigger Piece,” 2024) rendered in rich dark blacks and subtle tones of gray set against near white grounds. These objects, along with coupe glasses, found stones, and plastic bouquet wrappers, serve as tangible links to memories and emotions in the artist’s work. Her process involves sketching and photographing these items before distilling them into her drawings. 

Lerner employs various media, including graphite, charcoal, and tailor’s chalk, a water-soluble pigment inspired by traditional tailor’s tools. Her meditative process involves prolonged labor on the surface of each piece. The works also often depict word and letter forms that she sources from personal correspondence, abstracting them to the extent that they remain recognizable as text but not intelligible language.

In “Crisis Daughter I,” 2024, the light ground of the piece is offset by a darker gray application of charcoal to delineate a snaking spiral shape. From within the bright spiral form, as if the gray paper around it had been ripped away, extensive jet-black cursive handwriting alludes to a long but indecipherable piece of personal correspondence. The text of the writing is obscured by both the spiral screen effect that viewers see it through, as well as by the addition of so many tiny black flames amended to every word depicted. The resulting work is an emotionally resonant, enigmatic meditation on memory and loss rendered in a rich tonal range and extreme pictorial depth. The artist describes her burning letter drawings as “a one-way message, prayer, or something so awful it feels like bursting into flames.”

At points, Lerner’s figurative details recall Ed Ruscha’s calligraphic approach, while at others her flourishes of black and white abstraction and variously created marks and treated grounds are reminiscent of Christopher Wool’s large enamel paintings. She also draws inspiration from Jay DeFeo and Lee Lozano. Reflecting on those artists, Lerner states: “Both of their works are often palpable remnants of thought, explored in different avenues. Both artists have underpinnings of a deep kind of intimacy. There is always a feeling of something caged within their works on paper that I am after myself.”