For more than five decades, Gabriele Stötzer has been grappling with questions of justice, gender and self-determination. Her own body often plays a central role in her work – not as an object, but as a site of resistance and feminist self-assertion. Showing up and Not Remaining Silent is the artist’s largest institutional solo exhibition to date. Stötzer’s artistic practice is inextricably linked to her social and political engagement. In 1976, she was detained for organising a petition, which the GDR authorities declared a “defamation of state.” Following a year-long imprisonment, she joined the literary and artistic underground and later co-founded the art collective Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt. Many of her works formulate radical counter-concepts to state repression and control by pushing boundaries through experimentation and making space for vulnerability and desire.
Gabriele Stötzer, Die Auslöschung eines Blicks – Ich trage meine Wunden heute offen, 1983, courtesy: LOOCK Galerie, Berlin, photo: Heike Stephan © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026