The title Inheritor reflects Lerner’s role as both recipient and transmitter of memories, emotions, and artistic traditions. The exhibition features recent graphite and charcoal works on paper, central to her practice.
Lerner’s process is rooted in personal loss, exploring longing, devotion, and grief. Sparked by a wave of deaths among her late father’s friends in 2016, she turned to symbolic imagery drawn from mythology and experience to consider themes of passage and lineage. Contemporary poetry increasingly informs her visual and conceptual language.
Her unframed tondos—ranging from 12 to 50 inches—depict objects like a mortar and pestle (Preserves, 2024), a wishbone (The Bigger Piece, 2024), coupe glasses, and bouquet wrappers. These items link memory to form. Lerner sketches and photographs them before rendering each in dense black and pale gray on white grounds.
Using graphite, charcoal, and tailor’s chalk, she labors meditatively on each piece. Her works often feature abstracted text—sourced from personal letters—legible as form, but not as language.
