Gabriele Stötzer, a former political prisoner turned artist, is being celebrated with her first major museum exhibition at Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau gallery. The show, titled Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen (Show up and don’t be quiet), features 150 works in a dedicated wing and runs until 6 December. It marks the largest ever celebration of an East German female artist in a state museum.
From Prison to Art
Stötzer's artistic journey began during her year-long imprisonment in the late 1970s at Hoheneck women's prison in Saxony. She was incarcerated after protesting the expatriation of dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. Reflecting on that time, she said: '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.' The prison held 20 women per cell, working three shifts daily, and art became intertwined with her dream of another life.
Now 73, Stötzer remains active as a contemporary witness at Hoheneck, now a memorial museum. She accepts the label 'East German' but rejects being called a 'GDR artist'. Curator Julia Grosse noted: '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.'
Defiance and Creativity
Unlike many GDR intellectuals, Stötzer refused to be bought out by West Germany, staying in the East to use the GDR as an experimental space for artistic fellowship and feminist struggle. She lived underground, co-founded a women's artists' collective, and worked under constant Stasi surveillance, which often banned her activities. '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.'
Her choices were stark: 'Am I buying a sausage, or film for my Super 8 camera?' She invariably chose film, using its grainy qualities to capture individuality—dancing naked, body painting, free-climbing walls, or posing in black refuse sacks as if they were high fashion.
Exhibition Highlights
The exhibition spans 50 years and includes woven carpets, drawings, photographs, junk sculptures, and scrapbook-style albums. Because Stötzer was banned from exhibitions after refusing to join the GDR's official artists' association, these albums served as vital displays for trusted circles. 'We were broke, but we were totally fascinated by freedom,' she recalled.
Writer Carolin Würfel, specializing in eastern German feminist history, said the show is meaningful for East Germans as 'recognition by the official German discourse of Stötzer, an East German artist, as part of the cultural history of Germany, both east and west. 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.'
