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

Show at Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin is biggest ever celebration of an East German female artist in a state museum

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

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

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

Now 73, Stötzer has her first major show at one of Germany’s foremost galleries for contemporary art, in what is the biggest ever celebration of an East German female artist in a state museum.

Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen (Show up and don’t be quiet) is on display at the sprawling Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin, where 150 of Stötzer’s works are being exhibited in a dedicated wing until 6 December.

The title is taken from the book Stötzer wrote about her year spent locked up after protesting against the expatriation of dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann .

It was during her incarceration in the notorious women’s prison of Hoheneck in Saxony during the late 1970s that her artistic streak began to emerge.

“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,” she said, adding that she was lucky to have been young enough to find it interesting and to put that curiosity to use. “Our cell held 20 women … and we worked a three-shift schedule during the day. Art was bound up in my dream of another life.”

Stötzer has been active for years as a contemporary witness and storyteller at Hoheneck, which is now a memorial museum dedicated to the incarceration and persecution of female political prisoners in the communist east. She does not mind being referred to as “East German”, but balks at being reduced to the label of “GDR artist”.

“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,” said Julia Grosse, who curated the exhibition along with Christopher Wierling.

In preparation for it, they visited Stötzer in her Erfurt flat, where her kitchen doubles up as her atelier, and where she had been storing her work in every available nook and cranny.

In contrast to other artists and intellectuals in the GDR, Stötzer refused to be bought out of the east by the West German government, considering that it would allow the anti-capitalist regime to profit from her protest. She stayed, with the intention of using the GDR as an experimental space for artistic fellowship, feminist struggle and solidarity – just like she had experienced in prison.

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

“We made use of everything we experienced – our dreams, traumas, the exaltation, the humiliation,” she said. At her lowest, she recalls drawing on everything from the furniture, her dishes and wallpaper “so that I could recognise myself, and feel that I existed – to keep my own substance”.

Ultimately she believes the collective’s joint resistance helped to reveal not only the state’s repressive methods, but also its weaknesses.

She invariably chose to buy Super 8 film rather than sausages, using its soft and grainy qualities to capture expressions of the individuality the state sought to quash, in everything from dancing naked with her friends to orgiastic body painting, the free-climbing of walls, or dressing-up in black refuse sacks and posing in them with the same panache as if they were the latest must-have fashion items.

Among the exhibits spanning 50 years are woven carpets, drawings, photographs, sculptures made of junk and large scrapbook style albums, which – as she was forbidden from having exhibitions after refusing to join the GDR’s official artists’ association – served as a vital way for her to display her work in trusted circles.

Carolin Würfel, a writer with a particular interest in eastern German feminist history, said the exhibition was meaningful to East Germans in particular, because it was “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,” she said.