The Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin is hosting the largest ever exhibition of an East German female artist in a state museum, featuring 150 works by Gabriele Stötzer. Titled Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen (Show up and don't be quiet), the exhibition runs until December 6 and celebrates an artist who created under the oppressive conditions of the GDR regime.
From Prison to Art
Stötzer, now 73, began her artistic journey during a year-long imprisonment in the late 1970s after protesting the expatriation of dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. Incarcerated in the notorious women's prison of Hoheneck in Saxony, she found creativity behind bars. "Living in a land already cordoned off from the rest of the world by the Berlin Wall, I found myself behind yet another set of walls," she said. "Our cell held 20 women … and we worked a three-shift schedule during the day. Art was bound up in my dream of another life."
Defiance and Creativity
Stötzer refused to be bought out of East Germany by the West German government, choosing instead to stay and use the GDR as an experimental space for artistic fellowship, feminist struggle, and solidarity. She lived in a squat, co-founded a women's artists' collective, and worked under constant Stasi surveillance. "We made use of everything we experienced – our dreams, traumas, the exaltation, the humiliation," she said. At her lowest, she drew on furniture, dishes, and wallpaper "so that I could recognise myself, and feel that I existed – to keep my own substance."
Exhibition Highlights
The exhibition spans 50 years of Stötzer's work, including woven carpets, drawings, photographs, sculptures made of junk, and large scrapbook-style albums. She often chose to buy Super 8 film over food, using its soft, grainy qualities to capture expressions of individuality, from dancing naked with friends to orgiastic body painting and dressing in black refuse sacks. Curators Julia Grosse and Christopher Wierling visited Stötzer in her Erfurt flat, where her kitchen doubles as an atelier and her work filled every available space. "She's been celebrated as an eyewitness to history but until now has never been celebrated as an artist in her own right – and this is what this show seeks to rectify," Grosse said.
Significance for East German Art
Writer Carolin Würfel, who focuses on eastern German feminist history, noted the exhibition's importance: "It finally sends a signal that East German art and culture is not a niche, trapped in a vanished country, but part of our collective memory and our present." Stötzer does not mind being called "East German" but rejects the label "GDR artist." The exhibition aims to correct that, celebrating her as an artist rather than just a historical witness.
