When Riva Lehrer was an art student in Cincinnati in the 70s, she was told she should look for universal images. “The establishment art world told women their personal experience was irrelevant, unworthy of great art,” Lehrer says. “Unless you knew better, you bought into it. I was so confused, I had no idea why I wanted to be an artist.” Then she discovered the work of Frida Kahlo. “I had never seen anyone deal with anything in artwork that approximated my experience. It was like I was run over by a truck. It was permission to do what I wanted.”
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What she wanted was to paint the images that were haunting her, images arising from her own life and the lives around her. “Those images just come,” says Lehrer, who has been working in Chicago for most of the last decade. “They come again and again, mutating in my mind without my trying to work on them. I feel compelled to do them. For a long time I was afraid of doing the ones that wouldn’t leave me alone. Now, I try not to let other people’s discomfort stop me.”
“The primary fact is that I’m a painter. Not that I’m a lesbian, not that I’m disabled. I work from a language of physical difficulty, but the paintings are not about my specific health problems. They’re about the way extreme physical experiences bring you to a realization of who you are. They’re about transcendence.”
