by Olivia Noss // July 16, 2026
Gabriele Stötzer is an artist whose rebellious spirit has propelled her towards a wide range of visual media. Her dexterity in photography, painting and film was sharpened throughout her early life in opposition to the surveillance state of the GDR, which often enacted creative censorship and suppression of political dissent. Stötzer’s year-long imprisonment for “defamation of state” galvanized her artistic practice to counteract the oppressive forces at play in a divided Germany. Upon her release, Stötzer co-founded a women’s artist group called Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt, collaborating on performance art, films and music and showcasing the resulting works in countercultural art spaces. Her largest institutional retrospective thus far, ‘Dabei sein und nicht schweigen (Showing Up and Not Remaining Silent)’ at Gropius Bau highlights the artist’s use of her body—both as an individual and in tandem with others—as a means through which to champion her political beliefs. Her living archive of paintings, films, performances, textile art and photography offer vital insights into East German countercultural production by women, which decentered both men and artistic institutions as the primary arbiters of what was deemed worth seeing.
Gabriele Stötzer: ‘Dabei sein und nicht schweigen,’ 2026, installation view atGropius Bau // © Gropius Bau, photo by Rosa Merk
To enter the exhibition is to wade through a pool of this audiovisual material. A montage of experimental Super8 films by Stötzer and other members of Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt are projected from all directions. The compiled audio overlaps in swaths of sound, at times discordant and at other times blending seamlessly with other films playing on loop in the rest of the space. The artists’ strange choreographies sometimes read as highly directed, at other times more improvisational. Figures dance on screen, some contort their bodies, addressing the camera intermittently with vacant or knowing stares. A naked woman can be seen swaying with her eyes closed, facing the sun. Another woman’s hair sweeps in and out of frame like a foreground of foliage, her hands casting shadows across the figures that move slowly along her neck and chest, as if to caress or to conduct a spell. Surreal in nature and rooted in experimentation, the compilation of moving images together constructs a Lynchian dreamscape, offering a sparkling banality that is both familiar and unnerving.
Gabriele Stötzer: ‘Dabei sein und nicht schweigen,’ 2026, installation view atGropius Bau // © Gropius Bau, photo by Rosa Merk
Stötzer’s photographs are arguably the most exciting portion of the show, as they occupy realms of film, painting and performance simultaneously. Stötzer uses her body as a material, covering it in paint and pressing herself across a wall of mounted paper. She repeats this process until several impressions of her body echo one another across the wall. The result is a documented performance and action painting that falls within a similar vein as the bodily performances of earth artist Ana Mendieta. Stötzer then collages these gestures into small darkroom prints and creates a montage of them in grid formation, the sequential aspect of this presentation emphasizing the movement created in the process. In another set of images, Stötzer combines a series of self-portraits in which she paints her face, gradually performing more dramatic expressions in front of her camera and defining her features more drastically through dark paint that accents her androgynous face. Stötzer photographed herself to affirm her own existence during a time in which she had little to no recognition as a woman artist. With that, her nakedness and those of her subjects seem to resist patriarchal fantasy—their nakedness distinguished from nudity, one not for sexual consumption, but rather, for artistic engagement and visual experimentation.
Gabriele Stötzer: ‘Hüpstedt,’ 1981 // Courtesy of Gabriele Stötzer, photo by Ralf Klement © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Meanwhile, Stötzer’s paintings seem to deviate entirely from the visual language she constructs via lens-based media. While her photographs are more figural, her paintings and drawings are more fantastical in nature, depicting beasts and otherworldly creatures that dance across her compositions. The artist’s most recent work takes the form of huge wall-sized textiles, made from materials such as wool sourced from other artists in her group, which is now called Exterra XX. The artist draws from Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1961 short story, ‘Undine geht’ (‘Undine Leaves’), a feminist revision of a traditional German romance about a water-nymph named Undine who marries a man in order to obtain a soul. Rather than serving as a passive projection of male desire or dying on account of a man’s betrayal, the protagonist actively rejects the human world, condemning the objectification and systemic violence present in human society, largely enacted by men.
Gabriele Stötzer: ‘Undine kommt,’ 2025, installation view in ‘Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen,’ Gropius Bau, 2026 // © Gropius Bau, photo by Rosa Merk
In the early 1980s, Stötzer formed plein-air, salon-style meetups with other women artists in her orbit in her home village in Thuringia. The salons, eventually stopped by the Stasi in 1981, reveal that her meeting places were defined and often disrupted by the state. With this in mind, Stötzer also created books as a means to preserve and to showcase her work. The artist’s use of the book as an intimate and portable site of exhibition played a vital role in keeping her work alive, not only because she could work independently, but also because its portability kept it free from the grasp of censorship.
Gabriele Stötzer: ‘Die Auslöschung eines Blicks – Ich trage meine Wunden heute offen,’ 1983 // Courtesy of Gabriele Stötzer, photo by Heike Stephan, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Stötzer’s work asserts the body as material for thought, for collaboration, for claiming space and, as she calls it, “ecstasy as disobedience.” At a time when men dominated artistic spheres across Germany, Stötzer’s practice carried a self-authority and a strength of execution that feels markedly radical given the highly suppressive environment in which she produced it. When her work and that of her peers went unacknowledged, they created spaces for themselves: fashion shows held in churches, art shows in punk squats, drawings housed in books rather than galleries. Her epicene subjects—largely women—assert a freedom and a creative wherewithal, and contribute to a precious portion of GDR artworks that deviate from the coded social order of the time. Her guiding principle to make not only her life but those of her contemporaries the subject of art is a reminder of the importance of maintaining an artistic practice rooted in community, and avoiding the pitfalls of what she called “solitary rebellion.”
Exhibition Info
Gropius Bau
Gabriele Stötzer: ‘Dabei sein und nicht schweigen’
Exhibition: June 19–Dec. 6, 2026
berlinerfestspiele.de
Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, click here for map
