Gabriele Stötzer gets first major show at Martin
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- Gabriele Stötzer, 73, opens her first major exhibition, "Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen" (Show up and don't be quiet), at Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau, with 150 works in a dedicated wing on view through December 6.
- The exhibition title comes from Stötzer's book about her imprisonment in Hoheneck women's prison in Saxony after she protested the late-1970s expatriation of dissident singer Wolf Biermann; she says her art emerged behind bars alongside 20 cellmates on three-shift work schedules.
- Stötzer refused the West German government's buyout offer, stayed in the GDR, and co-founded a women's artists' collective under constant Stasi surveillance, treating the state — as curator Julia Grosse notes — as an "experimental space" for feminist struggle she had first experienced in prison.
- Banned from formal exhibitions for refusing to join the GDR's official artists' association, Stötzer circulated work through large scrapbook-style albums; the 50-year retrospective also includes woven carpets, junk sculptures, drawings, and grainy Super 8 films of friends dancing naked, body-painting, and posing in black refuse sacks.
- Curators Julia Grosse and Christopher Wierling prepared the show by visiting Stötzer's Erfurt flat, where her kitchen doubles as her atelier and she had been storing work in "every available nook and cranny."
- Writer Carolin Würfel called the show recognition of Stötzer as part of "the cultural history of Germany, both east and west" — a signal that East German art is "not a niche, trapped in a vanished country, but part of our collective memory and our present."
Why it matters: Stötzer's long-standing identity as "eyewitness to history" rather than artist in her own right — which curator Julia Grosse says this show explicitly seeks to rectify — is being rewritten by the first German state museum retrospective dedicated to an East German woman. With 150 works spanning 50 years, the exhibition positions Stötzer's banned, Stasi-surveilled practice as part of Germany's present cultural canon, not a relic of the GDR.
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