Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen

For more than five decades, Gabriele Stötzer has been grappling with questions of justice, self-determination and gender while critically examining societal power relations. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she was active in the artistic underground of the GDR, but it’s only in the last few years that her cross-disciplinary practice has received wider attention in the art world. In 2026, Gropius Bau presents her largest institutional solo show to date, Dabei sein und nicht schweigen, developed in close collaboration with Stötzer herself. In October the same year, the artist will receive the Goslarer Kaiserring, one of the world’s most prestigious art prizes.

Gabriele Stötzer is also one of the key artistic voices in the programme marking the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele. For this occasion, she has created a poster in an exclusive special edition, which will be available starting in May. She will also perform at Gropius Bau in late August as part of Exterra XX / Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt, together with the Ensemble for Intuitive Music Weimar.

About the Exhibition

Born in Thuringia in 1953, Gabriele Stötzer developed an independent, experimental artistic practice closely linked to her experiences of imprisonment and political struggle in the GDR. Shaped by the experience of state repression and surveillance, she worked within self-organised artistic networks, creating a body of work that encompasses photography, performance, film, ceramics, as well as textile and object art. Dabei sein und nicht schweigen brings together some 150 works, highlighting the breadth of her practice across various media. Stötzer’s works combine personal experience with an unflinching gaze at social conditions, often centring the artist’s own body as a site of feminist resistance and assertion. They formulate counternarratives to domination and repression by subverting boundaries and creating spaces of freedom, desire and radicality.

“Art became connected to the idea of a different life.” — Gabriele Stötzer

In 1977, in connection with a petition campaign against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann, she was arrested on charges of “defaming the state” and sentenced to one year in Hoheneck Women’s Prison. The experience strengthened her resolve to resist oppression and sparked her desire to become an artist. Following her release, she joined the literary and artistic underground in Erfurt, where she befriended punks and squatters and organised workshops, studios, exhibitions and public interventions.

Following her early work in writing, painting, drawing and weaving, Stötzer turned to photography around 1980/1981. Stepping both behind and in front of the camera, she staged herself and other participants, developing a collaborative practice centred on solidarity and exchange. In the mid-1980s, she co-founded the Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt, or Erfurt Women Artists’ Group (which performed under the name Exterra XX after the collapse of the GDR), the only female performance art group of its kind in East Germany. Over the next ten years, the group created a complex body of work comprising performances, fashion objects, manifestos, Super 8 films and experimental music.

“Our guiding principle was to make our lives the subject of art and to express them through fashion, film and performance. In this way, our individual acts of protest and resistance felt meaningful, helping us not to fade away in solitary rebellion.” — Gabriele Stötzer

The exhibition opens with Super 8 films by Stötzer and the Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt, demonstrating the artists’ experimental approach to the medium and its narrative possibilities. In around 15 works created between 1983 and 1990, observations of everyday life are interwoven with surreal, dreamlike sequences and actions performed in both private and public space. In the film Veitstanz/Feixtanz (1988), Stötzer and her collaborators attempt to reenact the medieval phenomenon of St. Vitus’ Dance, wherein groups of people, sometimes thousands, danced to the point of collapse. Ecstasy here is meant to be experienced as a form of disobedience and resistance – an “expression of the freedom that’s in all of us, if we decide to take it.”

Overall, the Gropius Bau exhibition brings together the life and work of Stötzer in seven chapters. One is dedicated to the work of the Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt, which operated as a collective and, with its fashion-object shows, reached an audience beyond the local art scene. Other rooms showcase Stötzer’s photographic experiments with gestures, movements and various materials, as well as her texts and drawings, which often emerged associatively and in parallel with one another. Central to the exhibition are Stötzer’s artists books – her “own little galleries” in which her creative strategies coalesce. The books attest to the artist’s ingenuity in finding ways to show her work despite limited access to exhibition spaces.

“Gabriele Stötzer’s practice is defiant and distinctive. To this day, her art operates outside of institutional structures and exposes injustice. With her sharp eye on society, clear artistic voice and punk spirit, Stötzer challenges categorisation and demonstrates how art might act as a catalyst for change. We are delighted to give this important artist the stage she deserves.” — Jenny Schlenzka, Gropius Bau Director

Stötzer created a new work specifically for Dabei sein und nicht schweigen: the large-scale sculpture Undine kommt (Undine Comes) (2026). Alongside other wool figures, Undine is on view for the first time in her own distinct presence and autonomy – no longer a drawing, no longer a costume worn by a performer, but larger than life and composed of elements such as ceramic and sheep’s wool. “For me, it’s about the power – and really the necessity – of these figures coming together in space,” says Stötzer. Some of the materials – the wool, for instance – come from works the artist created back in the 1980s, which she is now repurposing as part of an ongoing, living process.

Drawing on current and earlier works, Dabei sein und nicht schweigen traces the close intertwining of artistic practice, social engagement and dissident politics. In doing so, the exhibition highlights the enduring relevance of this groundbreaking artist’s work and aims to catalyse its long-overdue recognition.

Published alongside the exhibition is a bilingual volume in the book series The Practice – What Moves Artists, offering an in-depth look at Gabriele Stötzer’s work, ideas and artistic practice.

Curated by Julia Grosse, Independent Curator, with Christopher Wierling, Assistant Curator, Gropius Bau Concept: Julia Grosse and Franziska Schmidt, Director, Tempelhof-Schöneberg Municipal Galleries Exhibition Management: Sophie Winckler, Project Management, with Lisa Bockius, Exhibitions Fellow

The exhibition will be on view at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach from 14 March to 26 September 2027.

About the Artist

Gabriele Stötzer was born in 1953 in Emleben, Thuringia. From 1973 to 1976, she studied German language and art education at the Pädagogische Hochschule Erfurt, but was expelled after expressing solidarity with fellow students who had been dismissed from the university. In 1977, following her participation in a petition that opposed the expatriation of Wolf Biermann, she was imprisoned on charges of defaming the state. After 1990, her career expanded through numerous readings, lectures, publications and fellowships. Her work gained international visibility in the 2008/2009 exhibition re.act.feminism, where it was presented alongside artists such as Marina Abramović, VALIE EXPORT and Yoko Ono. Stötzer’s first institutional solo exhibition followed in 2013 at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. In subsequent years, her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including in Leipzig, Berlin, Bonn, Dresden, Warsaw and Vienna. Stötzer’s works are held in major collections, including the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Deutscher Bundestag in Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, the Berlinische Galerie, Kunsthalle Bremen, and DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam. In recognition of her political and artistic work, Stötzer was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz in 2013. Shortly after receiving the prestigious Pauli-Prize from Kunsthalle Bremen in 2024, she was announced as the 2026 recipient of the Kaiserring of the City of Goslar, one of the most important international awards in contemporary art. Gabriele Stötzer lives and works in Erfurt.

Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation