Sculptures, installations, paintings: their works are as varied as the artists themselves.
Photo: Eric Chernow
Life and art – how are they connected? The exhibition “What is our strength: 50 female artists from the GDR” invites you to take a different look at the impact of biographical experiences on art production.
It is an undertaking that is as daring as it is necessary that the artist and curator Andrea Pichl is currently undertaking in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien. Daring, because even in art classes at school – sometimes also in the GDR, by the way – it was taught to let a work speak for itself without consulting the biography of the person who created it. But that is exactly what Pichl does. In her exhibition, she collects works based on biographical criteria. The 50 women whose work she chose were born between the 1930s and 1980s. So some were familiar with social systems from before the founding of the GDR, while others only just experienced the first grades of the GDR school system. Because all of them take part in the exhibition voluntarily, one has to assume that they also claim the label »artist from the GDR« for themselves.
This comes as a surprise to some. Else Gabriel, for example, was already engaged in performance art in the context of the auto-perforation artists in the 1980s, which radically transcended the narrow confines of the official art business – and which in the subsequent all-German art business was happily classified as “oppositional art”, i.e. the (art) politically good and agreeable, was cooped up. Also taking part is Erika Stürmer-Alex, who with her abstract compositions on canvas, wood or styrofoam also evaded prescribed realism. Two Styrofoam sculptures made of spheres, boxes and frames have been selected from her. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, who was known for a long time mostly in the context of her husband Robert Rehfeldt’s Mail Art, operated even more closely on the fringes of official art production, but has recently been rediscovered primarily because of her early typewriter graphics. Sheets with these compositions, which are as dynamic as they are minimalist, are shown in the exhibition.
Wolf-Rehfeldt is a good example of the need for this exhibition. Because women who started their artistic careers in the GDR had it twice as difficult in the art world from the 1990s onwards. Being a woman was a handicap when it came to large one-man exhibitions at important houses, being from the GDR was perhaps the even greater flaw. According to Pichl’s analyses, female artists have only rarely been represented in the last three years, even in overview exhibitions of art from the GDR. She counted between 14 and 23 percent.
This is a constant in the art business. Already in 2009, at the exhibition »and now. Artists from the GDR«, which was also on view in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien and showed works by Gabriel and Stürmer-Alex, the complaint about the double disadvantage was loud and audible.
In the good decade in between, however, the view of the problem has changed somewhat. The exclusion mechanisms are still effective, and are still quite rightly criticised. While the biographical GDR background was often downplayed for a long time or only used to mark an outsider position, it is brought into play as a productive moment in the context of the current exhibition. In her foreword to the accompanying publication, Pichl considers the origin from the GDR to be essential for the artistic work and also as a “prerequisite for substance, strength and relevance in the contemporary context”. The journalist Charlotte Misselwitz expresses this change in the assessment of East German origins most succinctly. As the daughter of the co-founders of the Pankower Friedenskreis, Hans-Jürgen and Ruth Misselwitz, she had a family background that was considered positive in the new system because of opposition. But even she, as she explains in her article in the publication, did not feel that her experiences were “suitable” – and she finally answered questions about growing up in the GDR with phrases like “Yes, we had electricity too”. It was only via the detour abroad that she regained a meaningful relationship with her own origins.
A new self-confidence can now be derived from this. In her contribution, Else Gabriel writes about the values that knowledge of system changes and system distortions have. “To deny the associated specific sensitization would be a waste of artistic potential,” she says, referring to the art students from East Germany who have just started their studies and are shaped by their parents’ transformational experiences. Seen in this way, new generations of female artists from the GDR are currently growing up.
In view of the variety of means of expression and themes, the exhibition itself cannot be summarily described. Right at the beginning one is confronted with portraits of two women who were very influential in East Germany. Else Gabriel painted Beate Zschäpe, the NSU terrorist from Jena, in oil. She is half hidden behind her black curtain of hair. Nearby is Birgit Breuel, who, as president of the Treuhand, was responsible for the end of the working lives of many East Germans. Susanne Rische and Henrike Naumann placed Breuel’s portrait in front of the facade of a company occupied by the workforce.
The confrontation with the GDR and East German society also characterizes numerous other works. In the »Falscher Hase« installation, Jana Müller not only traces her father’s life as a police officer. She also links the right-wing extremist attacks in Halle, her hometown, and Christchurch in New Zealand, where part of her family lives. Ulrike Kuschel makes posters out of texts from the GDR’s military training program. Categories of evaluation that were once bestowed upon oneself are recalled: “class-fit,” “essentially class-fit,” “evasive,” “non-class-fit.”
In the context of these predicates, the title of the exhibition “What our strength consists of” gets a rather shrill ring. But it also becomes clear that many passages of the solidarity song by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, from which this line comes, are just as relevant today as they were when it was written almost 100 years ago. The exhibition thus transcends several epochal boundaries.
»What our strength lies in: 50 artists from the GDR«, until October 30, 2022, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin.
