‘We were broken, but we rejoiced in freedom’: exhibits show the East German artist Gabriele Stötzer | Art

Gabriele Stötzer remembers the days when she had to decide: “Am I buying a sausage, or the film for my Super 8 camera?”

Stötzer was one of the most prominent artists in the Communist East Germanyand his desire to create was born in defiance and in defiance of the materialism and repressive restrictions of the GDR regime.

He said: “We didn’t have freedom, but we were very interested in freedom.”

Now 73 years old, Stötzer is having her first major exhibition at one of Germany’s oldest galleries, in the largest celebration of a female artist in East Germany in a state museum.

Be there and don’t be silent (Show and don’t be silent) is on display at the Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin, where 150 of Stötzer’s works are on display in the dedicated wing until 6 December.

The title is taken from a book Stötzer wrote about the year he was imprisoned after protesting against the deportation of a dissident singer-songwriter. Wolf Biermann.

It was in the notorious Hoheneck women’s prison in Saxony in the late 1970s that her artistic talent first emerged.

“Living in a country already surrounded by the rest of the world Berlin WallI found myself behind other walls,” he said, adding that he was lucky that he was young enough to find it interesting and use that interest.” “Our cell had 20 women … and we worked three shifts during the day. Art was built in my dreams of another life.”

Stötzer has worked for many years as a witness and reporter at Hoheneck, which is now a memorial site dedicated to the imprisonment and torture of female political prisoners in the communist east. He doesn’t mind being called “East Germany”, but just wants to be reduced to “GDR artist”.

“He is known as an eyewitness to history but until now he has not been celebrated as an artist himself – and this is what this exhibition aims to fix,” said Julia Grosse, who directed the exhibition together with Christopher Wierling.

In preparation for it, he visited Stötzer in his Erfurt home, where his kitchen doubles as his shop, and where he kept his work in every available space.

Unlike other artists and intellectuals in the GDR, Stötzer refused to be bought east by the West German government, thinking that it would allow the anti-capitalist government to profit from his protests. She stayed, with the goal of using the GDR as an experimental site for art communication, feminist struggle and solidarity – as she was in prison.

She went underground, lived in a bedroom and later founded a group of female artists under the watchful eye of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, who often banned the group’s activities.

“We used everything we experienced – our dreams, pain, promotion, humiliation,” he said. Underneath, he remembers drawing everything from the chairs, his plates and paper “to recognize myself, to feel that I was there – to keep my things”.

In the end he believes that the collective resistance of the groups helped to reveal not only the repressive methods of the government, but also its weaknesses.

He always chose to buy a Super 8 film instead of a sausage, using its soft and vivid form to capture the voice of a person that the government wanted to disrupt, from dancing naked with his friends to painting the body of pleasure, free climbing the walls, or wearing black garbage bags and placing them in the same form as if they were new products.

Among the exhibits spanning 50 years are woven carpets, paintings, photographs, sculptures made of waste and large scrapbook albums, which – as he was banned from exhibiting after refusing to join the GDR’s artists’ collective – became an important way for him to present his work in reliable circles.

Carolin Würfel, a writer who is very interested in the history of women in eastern Germany, said that the exhibition had a meaning for East Germany in particular, because it was “recognized by the German story of Stötzer, the artist of East Germany, as part of the history of German culture, east and west.

“Finally it sends a signal that the art and culture of East Germany is not a place, which is locked away in a rare country, but is part of our memory and our present,” he said.