2024, photo: Natalia Keshi
*12.03.1986 Dresden (GER)
*lives and works in Paris, France
Solo shows
2025 Assise sur la langue d'une grenouille, Galerie du Haut-Pavé, Paris
2007 Monkeys, drawings, glass works, sculptures, Town museum Stolpen (DE)
Group shows (selection)
2025 Exil, Fama Piktura, Dresden (DE), (curator: Dirk Großer)
2025 Quand reviendrez-vous ?, Saint-Julien-du-Sault (France), (curator: Antoine Perrot, Longjun Zang)
2024 Pariser Licht, 3W1F, Dresden
2024 Kolkata International Art Exhibition, Kolkata (India)
2024 9th Dresden Artists' Fair, Participation
2022 Incertitude, HCE Galerie, Saint-Denis (FR), (curator: Gastineau Massamba)
2022 Speed Dating, Motorenhalle Dresden
2022 Speed Dating, Théâtre des Expositions, Paris (curator: Violette Morisseau, Vincent Enjalbert)
2021 Surrender, Pilot Gallery, Riga (LV), (curator: Elina Drake)
2020 Prospektive, Oktogon Dresden, (curator: Lena Dobner)
2019 Prospektive, Semperdepot, Vienna
2019 Waschecht, Blaue Fabrik Dresden
2018 Sprösslinge mit Spass, Radebeul city gallery
2018 Wunder.point an artistic search for traces, Radebeul Museum of Lies
2017 10 years of “Der Maulkorb”, Gallery Adlergasse, Dresden
2009 Welcome to Syria. Exhibition on a study trip to Syria, Gallery Salonfähig, Halle (GER)
Residencies and Scholarships
2023 Tao Hua Tan International Artist Retreat and Residency, (China)
exhibition at Hefei – Kurume Friendship Art Gallery
2023 La Résidence des Talents – Espace des possibles, Meschers-sur-Gironde (France)
2019 The International Art Workshop, Gludsted (Denmark)
2019 22nd International Dresden Summer Academy for Visual Arts, scholarship & exhibition
Artistic Education
2021 Fine Arts Diploma, Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, studio Prof. Ralf Kerbach
2020–21 Erasmus, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, studio Prof. Nina Childress
2014 Bachelor of Arts, communication design, University of Art and Design Burg Giebichenstein Halle
2010–11 Erasmus, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
2006–08 1st degree of Fine Arts, University of Art and Design Burg Giebichenstein Halle, Prof. Christine Triebsch
The body and its utopian core
‘The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine.’
(Michel Foucault, 1966, The utopian body)
In this series of large-scale paintings spread over three years, the artist continues her experiments with the figuration or impossible figuration of the body, with a passionate interest in what Brauner called the ‘morphological war of man’ and its procession of metamorphic images, driven by the processes of displacement, distortion, attraction and coalescence that affect the human anatomy.
All the more so as the body is engaged in strange migrations, bound for universes where fantasy is given total freedom. It is present everywhere, even when absent or erased, always transfigured by incredible, vibrant, electric colours and bathed in hallucinatory, psychedelic or caustic lighting, refusing to accept the traditional, patriarchal objectification of the male gaze.
She also does this as a ‘semionaut’ artist (Nicolas Bourriaud). She produces itineraries through familiar signs, forms and images, cultural references, the codes of legends, tales, comic strips and advertising, all of which she mischievously branches off, hijacking with a humour all her own, pushing them to the limit, to the point of derision and sarcasm, that form of laughter which, according to its etymology, ‘tears the flesh’, a biting irony.
It's a quest in which we can be sensitive to the freedom of the shapes and drawings, to the treatment, even the exasperation of the colours, to the diversity of the entries in ‘the graphic parable of the human condition’ …but above all it challenges our gaze as to the enigmatic object that drives the artist's research and gesture.
The point from which this gesture springs, a knot of soul, thought and desire, is always a point on the body, a place of urgent, burning questions: what is it? Where is it? What can it do? Foucault evokes his ‘pitiless place’: It will always be where I am, and that is the source of an unsurpassable suffering, captured every morning in the mirror; it will never respond to the utopia where I would like to be and yet all these utopias and dreams of the body that wants to escape from itself find their origin and their point of application in this body. It takes one to work against it, and it is this work that establishes the relationship between its suffering and its desire – desire is this third dimension: through desire my body is always elsewhere, linked to all the other places in the world, to the point of being elsewhere than in the world.
Such is the utopian core of the body, a three-dimensional sequence of the body’s experience, to be kept warm within the body, a compass to orient oneself in Anna Ditscherlein’s very pleasant migrations of the body.
Georges Quidet, HCE Gallery, 2025