‘We were broke, but fascinated by freedom’: exhibition showcases East German artist Gabriele Stötzer | Art

Gabriele Stötzer remembers when he had to decide: “Do I buy sausages or film for my Super 8 camera?”

Stötzer was one of the most radical artists of communist East Germany, and his desire to create was born in defiance of and despite the material conditions and oppressive restrictions of the East German regime.

“We were broke, but we were completely fascinated by the freedom,” he said.

Stötzer, now 73, is having his first major exhibition at one of Germany’s leading contemporary art galleries; this is the largest ever celebration of an East German female artist in a state museum.

Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen (Show and be silent) is on display at the sprawling Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin, where 150 of Stötzer’s works will be on display in a special section until December 6.

The title is taken from the book Stötzer wrote about the year dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann spent in prison after protesting his deportation.

Her artistic streak began to emerge while she was incarcerated in the notorious women’s prison Hoheneck in Saxony in the late 1970s.

“Living in a country cordoned off from the rest of the world by the Berlin Wall, I found myself behind another set of walls,” he said, adding that he was lucky to be young enough to find this interesting and put his curiosity to use. “There were 20 women in our cell… and we worked three shifts during the day. Art was connected to my dream of another life.”

Stötzer has been active for years as a contemporary witness and storyteller at Hoheneck, now a memorial museum dedicated to the imprisonment and persecution of female political prisoners in the communist east. He does not hesitate to be called an “East German”, but he does hesitate to be labeled as an “East German artist”.

“He has been remembered as an eyewitness to history, but until now he has never been celebrated as an artist in his own right – and that is what this exhibition seeks to correct,” said Julia Grosse, who curated the exhibition with Christopher Wierling.

In preparation for this, they visited Stötzer at his apartment in Erfurt; Here, his kitchen also served as a workshop and he kept his works in every nook and cranny.

Unlike other artists and intellectuals in East Germany, Stötzer refused to be bought out of the east by the West German government, thinking it would allow him to profit from his protest against the anti-capitalist regime. She remained there, intending to use East Germany as an experimental space for artistic sisterhood, feminist struggle and solidarity, just as she had lived in prison.

She went underground, lived in a slum, and later co-founded a collective of women artists while under constant surveillance by the Stasi, the East German secret police, who frequently banned the collective’s activities.

“We benefited from everything we experienced: our dreams, our traumas, our ecstasies, our humiliations,” he said. At her worst, she recalls, she used everything from furniture to dishes to wallpaper “so that I could know myself and feel that I existed and preserve my own essence.”

Ultimately, he believes, the collective’s collective resistance helps expose not only the state’s oppressive methods but also its weaknesses.

In everything from dancing naked with friends to exuberant body painting, freely climbing walls, or wearing black trash sacks and posing in them with equal panache as if they were the latest must-have fashion item, she has always preferred to buy Super 8 film over sausages, using the soft and rough qualities of sausages to capture expressions of individuality that the state seeks to suppress.

Spanning 50 years, the exhibitions include woven tapestries, drawings, photographs, sculptures made from scraps, and large scrapbook-style albums; these served as a vital way for him to exhibit his work in trusted circles, as he was banned from exhibiting after refusing to join East Germany’s official artists’ association.

Author Carolin Würfel, who has a special interest in East German feminist history, said that the exhibition was particularly meaningful to East Germans because it was “the recognition by official German discourse of Stötzer, an East German artist, as part of the cultural history of both east and west Germany.”

“It finally sends a signal that East German art and culture is part of our collective memory and present, not a niche stuck in a vanished country,” he said.