I live by the ocean
And during the night
I dive into it
Down to the bottom
Underneath all currents
And drop my anchor
As this is where I'm staying
This is my home

Song by Björk Guðmundsdóttir, 1993

Mylasher and Marie Jeschke are showing their exhibition Anchor from May 10-19, 2024 at the C.Rockefeller Center Dresden. Both set anchor in unusual places - in search of new faces of nature, they engage in an intensive examination of the environment around them. They often work outdoors, exploring their surroundings in a painterly and sculptural manner, thereby entering into co-authorship with their own environment. They invite us to immerse ourselves in a familiar environment that has now been artistically reinterpreted. We look at our planetary home from the perspective of non-human agents, bottom-up from the seabed, so to speak. Both artists present a new series of works and at the same time situate themselves in a medium that is new to them. Mylasher lives and works in Leipzig, Jeschke in Berlin.

In the middle of the exhibition space is a kind of gate, which feels like a transition into another world. Here on it Mylasher presents some works from the Moonage Daydream series. The series consists of 40 glazed ceramic vessels and was created in 2023/24. During the work process, the artist focuses on transformation and the process as such. Mylasher works in special environments - such as in the forest, in a river or in ice. In the intensive examination of her own environment with all her senses, the elements of the surroundings flow into the process and the artist enters a threshold state between reality and the subconscious, between the outside and the inside. The vessels are a kind of gateway to a world that cannot be grasped linguistically. Here, staged around a portal, they invite the question of what awaits us on the other side when we pass through the portal. They tell stories of artistic intuition and of the connection to nature. Mylasher's ceramics poetically negotiate the interplay between objects and materials, thoughts and imagination, and the human body as a medium, asking what it means to place the anchor at an interface between different worlds.

Marie Jeschke needs an actual anchor so that she can paint underwater with her canvas and not be swept up by the buoyancy. Based on artistic experiments, she has developed a method for painting underwater. She descends into the water with pots of paint tied around her body and, just like her canvas, is held in place by diving belts. The artist applies the specially prepared paint, mixed with linseed oil, pigments, sand and ash, directly to the canvas without any other aids. Gradually, she explores different bodies of water and their identity. Her paintings always remain abstract, but hint at figurative shapes. They are reminiscent of medical imaging techniques, such as chest x-rays. Perhaps only the ability to breathe underwater separates us from life deep in the sea. At the same time, the round shapes bear witness to non-human agents that live in a parallel world.

Text by: Laura Seidel & Kira Dell / Curator-Duo Neun Kelche (Berlin)