Rachel Cohen

Gabriela Stötzer Work With What You Have

The first I saw was in Dresden. At the Albertinum SKD. The director Hilke Wagner pointed it out as she took me around, an old-school television set low to the ground, on it a film of a woman who appeared to be in a prison cell, metal bunks, a table. When I went back through the collection on my own, I stopped to watch for a while – work of immediacy, funny and physical and terrible. She spun about in the jail cell, she and another person moved in cyclic rhythms, she sat down and tore open a giant loaf of bread, squishing it, immersing herself in it. Stötzer.

The wall text explained that she had spent a year in prison, after creating a petition. Hilke Wagner had said she felt the Albertinum had not done enough to collect important dissident East German artists, especially women, that she was trying to build that part of the collection. Also, a small oil of a figure turned away, a long thought from the artist:

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Opening before we left Berlin, a major Stötzer show at the Gropius Bau, where I had learned in the months we were there to expect that the exhibitions would be of unusual quality, unusually reflective. On the stairs mounting to the second floor, an installation of mirrors, on one side the word East, on another the word West, so that you could see the two words endlessly receding within one another.

The first room, films. Most on Super 8 I think. A quote on the wall from Stötzer, they, living in Erfurt, were all fascinated by the film, sometimes they would go without food for a couple of days in order to buy film.

She worked with several women, a collaborative group, Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt. They met in abandoned buildings, places where there was a certain freedom. They were shockingly free. Sexual in their bodies for themselves and one another, with a different relation to the camera than the preprocessed one we have grown used to, not for the camera, more like along with the camera. Women tumbling down green hillsides and climbing arduously up them, androgynous figures with much hair in and over one another, a woman with large tufts of hair stuffed and bulging inside body stockings, a long slow film just of the open legs of a woman and her sex. If Stötzer was photographing women nude, she would also take off her clothes.

One thing that happened – before, during, and after the year of imprisonment, Stötzer and others of her friends were under constant surveillance by the Stasi. Sometimes the informants were part of the group of collaborators. Some of the films were made with people who turned out to be informants, especially two men who seemed hectically delighted by the freedom of their impostorship. This film I found less good, but still interesting. Work with what you have.

One room had drawings, textiles and especially ceramics. Stötzer used to paint all the crockery in her house. Otherwise she felt alienated. She liked to be able to see herself in the objects that surrounded her. I thought this was an interesting aftereffect of imprisonment. The mass-produced object, the metal bed, the wooden table, becomes menacing and remains so when you return.

The slippage of the spliced medium an absolutely central device and strategy.

For example, it was very hard to have art shows, you couldn’t have dissident work up on the walls of a gallery, too exposed. So she made books that held drawings, photographs, large collaged pages – these were transportable, could be opened up and seen by sympathetic viewers, art objects that could circulate. These books are terrific, striking. A rough sense for how to take the body and the model seriously while still cutting to the heart. The words and their scrawling becoming part of the work.

The work I had the least feeling for was the most recent. Several huge rug-like pieces, they seemed almost as if made with a crochet hook, of strange chimerical beings.

I thought these were whimsical and garish, out of step. Unlike the earlier decades of work that felt so aesthetically true. Perhaps a very difficult problem to have worked so long in conditions of deprivation and secrecy that necessitated tight scale, and now to be working in the current decade, long after reunification, in conditions of excess and over-sharing and widespread recognition of her powers. Perhaps my own romanticization of that ‘truer’ more confined earlier artistic impulse.

I left Gropius Bau with the feeling of having been in the presence of a great artist, a great body of work.

I had seen that there was to be another small Stötzer show, in a gallery called Loock, which seemed to be far from anything I could get to in our last days in the city. On my final day going around on my own, I managed a few of the spots I had meant to see, there were others I couldn’t fit, I went shopping for a present for a friend, further and further, looking at objects, decided against a fancy coffee in a fancy café, crossing the street, looked back and up, “Loock.”

In the window, a ceramic toilet, painted with yellow, orange and brown whorling lines, with faces, a pair of eyes. Hilarious, cunning, disturbed.

An amazing small oil on the wall of a woman with stark dark lines of hair, stepping forward while simultaneously looking down at what might be her own heart bleeding in her hands.

A series of drawings that I hurriedly photographed and still have not had time to sit with.

A longer wall text with Stötzer’s own reflection on the meaning of a toilet in the open, from June of 2026:

The show at Loock is titled “Beginnen Im Rinnen der Zeit” which translates as either Beginning in the Flow of Time, or Beginning in the Gutter of Time.

Last of Berlin and so a place to begin now that we are home, in Chicago.