Austrian born painter and woodcutter Lena Göbel (*1983 in Ried im Innkreis, AUT) explores hybrid worlds that are populated by mythical creatures who appear to be half animal, half human. Her motives are strongly rooted in her rural upbringing evoking customs such as the wear of traditional costumes, poaching, pictorial narratives, and dark as well as humorous fables and legends. Göbel enhances the archaic traditional approach by diving deeply into art history. She thereby refers to classical sacral and mundane image types such as Lucretia, a tragic figure in ancient Rome, and reads their story through a contemporary lens.

Thus, Lena Göbel’s oeuvre is very much based on contrasts and the juxtaposition of the past and the present. The heads of animals such as carps, cats, or beavers, are enigmatically entwined with human bodies in traditional clothing, granting the beastly creatures a strangely human demeanor that extends even to their facial expression.

Lena Göbel succeeds in translating her working with contrasting topics into her artistic practice. For more than 20 years, she has been applying woodcut as a basis for most of her artworks.