Artist Lauren Drescher’s mythical mermaid prints at Planthouse New York

(Image credit: Cary Whittier)

Lauren Drescher was back in the French Pyrenees last summer when she felt a strong longing for the sea, particularly the New Zealand beach where she has been spending her winters for the last few decades. Alone at her high altitude mountain home in the heart of Europe, she found herself daydreaming about her daily swims in the Oceania. The artist’s musings is the subject of her ongoing exhibition, Swimmers, at New York gallery Planthouse.

Washed in an aquatic blue ink, Drescher’s prints of bathers, animals and sea creatures strip the subjects off of a distinction between the real and the invented. Instead, the intimate vignettes rejoice in their rendition of their own particular realm in which beings of all species fall into a rhythm not unlike the water’s own dance. 'The beautiful thing about making pictures is that we don’t have to explain too much,' Drescher tells Wallpaper*.

A keen swimmer, Drescher has a relentless passion for the sea. 'I feel so liberated in the water,' she says. In fact, the artist tries to take a dip every day when she's spending time in New Zealand. 'I break my day according to whenever there is a high tide,' she adds.

This personal ever-transformative relationship with the water, and Mother Nature more broadly, lies in the core of her prints which she creates by needle drawing onto recycled TetraPak cartons. The material, commonly found in commercial milk brands, features a thick cardboard surface and a thin aluminum lining, which allows for gentle gestures on the surface. The inventive dry point etching technique results in ethereal prints on Japanese paper which the artist prefers for its 'handmade process and forgiving nature.' The process accommodates Drescher’s nomadic life between New Zealand, France and occasionally her hometown of New York, thanks to the prints’ minimal weight.

Weightlessness is a unifying attribute of the works on view. Drescher finds parallels between swimming and flying, which lend kinetic juxtapositions in her work, like female figures dancing with sea creatures hovering joyfully beneath puffy clouds.

Faces, both animal and human, have emotional depth ('Animals are extremely sentient creatures,' she says) while figures – be it a stingray or swimmer; cloud or wave – are rendered in a similar scale, similar to traditional Japanese woodblock prints.

Drescher also finds inspiration in a 17th-century French animal encyclopedia. The fact that the majority of animals, such as elephants, crocodiles and tigers, were drawn by someone who had never seen them in-person gives a naive veneer to an otherwise scientifically-purposed resource.

Says Drescher, 'the fact that they were in created in the most fantastical way reminds me of pure imagination,.' She hopes her audience will similarly get lost in the daydream.

Lauren Drescher: Swimmers is on view through 21 February 2026 at Planthouse, 526 W 26th St #416, New York, NY 10001.

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Osman Can Yerebakan is a New York-based art and culture writer. Besides Wallpaper*, his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, GQ UK, The Guardian, Artforum, BOMB, Airmail and numerous other publications. He is in the curatorial committee of the upcoming edition of Future Fair. He was the art and style editor of Forbes 30 Under 30, 2024.

With contributions from

Michael Reynolds - Producer