Image: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main
The Gropius Bau in Berlin is presenting 'Dabei sein und nicht schweigen', a major solo exhibition devoted to Gabriele Stötzer, the artist, activist and feminist whose practice emerged from life under pressure in the former GDR. The exhibition runs from 19 June to 6 December 2026 and traces a body of work shaped by surveillance, imprisonment, resistance and self-documentation. In a newsletter tip highlighting the show, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt framed Stötzer’s art as an act of survival within a system of oppression and erosion.
According to the exhibition text, Stötzer was born in 1953 near Gotha in Thuringia and became involved in opposition activity when she signed the petition against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann, being the first to do so. She was arrested the night before she was due to take the list to East Berlin and spent 12 months in the women’s prison Hoheneck. The source material says that experience, along with the enforced nudity and intense proximity to other women, altered her perception of women and her own body, and that art became a survival strategy.
The exhibition is curated by Julia Grosse and Christopher Wierling, who place Stötzer’s artistic production at the center of the presentation. The show opens with 12 Super-8 videos that establish her visual world, combining early documentary black-and-white footage from Erfurt with color images from 1989. The newsletter and exhibition text both describe her work as documenting her life and resistance against the DDR regime, while the exhibition itself shows how closely that political experience is tied to her artistic forms.
A recurring thread in the source material is the way Stötzer turned everyday materials and small-scale formats into a language of dissent. One room is devoted to her book objects, leporellos and folders made between 1982 and 1988, containing her own texts, drawings, collages and overpainted photographs. The exhibition also includes her body-centered films and images, in which simple means carry strong formal and political charge: the text mentions wire covering a mouth, mascara smudged from image to image, and serial arrangements of poses and gestures that developed into a personal alphabet of signs.
Among the works cited is the 1989 Super-8 film in which Stötzer stands naked before a mirror and repeats the question 'Hab’ ich euch nicht blendend amüsiert?' 66 times while covering her body with color. The exhibition text places the work in an Erfurt courtyard and links it to the atmosphere of surveillance in which she lived, noting that the Stasi file later documented the extent of that monitoring. The source material also mentions that in December 1989 Stötzer was among four women who occupied the Stasi district administration in Erfurt to stop the destruction of files.
Stötzer has continued to speak publicly about her experiences, and the source notes that she received the Federal Cross of Merit in 2013. It also states that in October she will receive the Kaiserring in Goslar, becoming the first East German artist in that line of honorees. The Gropius Bau exhibition is described in the source as the first solo exhibition by an East German woman at the institution 36 years after German reunification, with works ranging from early documentary footage to more recent pieces such as 'Undine kommt' (2025), on view in Berlin through 6 December 2026.
