“We were penniless, but fascinated by freedom”: an exhibition featuring East German artist Gabriele Stotzer | art

Gabrielle Stutzer remembers the days when she had to decide: “Am I going to buy a hot dog or film for my Super 8 camera?”

Stutzer was one of the most radical artists in communist East Germany, and her desire to create was born in defiance and despite the material conditions and oppressive constraints of the GDR regime.

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

Stutzer, now 73, is having her first major show at one of Germany’s most important contemporary art galleries, the largest ever celebration of an East German artist in a state museum.

Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen (Show and do not be silent) is on view at the sprawling Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin, where 150 of Stötzer’s works are on display in a dedicated pavilion until December 6.

The title is taken from the book Stutzer wrote about the year she spent locked up after protesting the deportation of dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann.

While imprisoned in the notorious women’s prison in Hohneck in Saxony in the late 1970s, her artistic streak began to emerge.

“I live in a land that was already cordoned off from the rest of the world by the Berlin Wall, and I found myself behind another set of walls,” she said, adding that she was lucky that she was young enough to find it interesting and exploit that curiosity. “There were 20 women in our cell… and we worked three shifts during the day. Art was connected to my dream of another life.”

Stutzer has been active for years as a contemporary witness and narrator at Hohneck, now a memorial museum dedicated to the incarceration and persecution of women political prisoners in the Communist East. She doesn’t mind being referred to as “East German,” but she refuses to be reduced to the title of “German Democratic Republic artist.”

“She has been celebrated as an eyewitness to history, but until now she has not been celebrated as an artist in her own right – and that is what this exhibition seeks to correct,” said Julia Gross, who curated the exhibition with Christopher Ferling.

In preparation, they visited Stötzer in her apartment in Erfurt, where her kitchen doubled as her studio, and where she stored her works in every available nook and cranny.

In contrast to other artists and intellectuals in the GDR, Stutzer refused to be bought out of the East by the West German government, believing that this would allow the anti-capitalist regime to profit from her protest. She remained there with the aim of using the GDR as an experimental space for artistic fellowship, feminist struggle and solidarity – just as she had lived in prison.

She went underground, lived in a squat, and later co-founded a group of female artists while under constant surveillance by the East German secret police, the Stasi, who often banned the group’s activities.

“We benefited from everything we went through — our dreams, our traumas, our exaltations, our humiliations,” she said. At her worst, she remembers drawing on everything from furniture, dishes and wallpaper “so I could recognize myself, and feel like I existed – to maintain my own essence.”

Ultimately, she believes, mass collective resistance helped expose not only the state’s oppressive methods, but also its weaknesses.

She always chose to buy Super 8 film rather than hot dogs, using its soft, grainy qualities to capture expressions of individualism that the state sought to quash, in everything from dancing naked with her friends to body painting, free-climbing walls, or wearing black trash bags and posing in them with the same panache as if they were the latest must-have fashion item.

Among the exhibits spanning 50 years are woven carpets, drawings, photographs, sculptures made from rubbish and large scrapbook albums, which were a vital means for her to exhibit her work in trusted circles, as she was banned from holding exhibitions after refusing to join the official artists’ association of the GDR.

Caroline Forfel, a writer particularly interested in the history of feminism in East Germany, said the exhibition was meaningful to East Germans in particular, because it was “a recognition by official German discourse of Stotzer, an East German artist, as part of the cultural history of Germany, both east and west.”

“It finally sends a signal that art and culture in East Germany is not a special place, confined to a vanishing country, but rather part of our collective memory and present,” she said.