How Gabriele Stötzer Defied the Stasi

Kim Cordova | Frieze | 3rd June 2026

Life as a defiant artist in East Germany got so tough that Stötzer drew on “furniture, dishes and wallpaper so that I could feel that I existed”. She documented state surveillance methods, portraying them as “artistic”. Her art – mainly drawings, photographs and sculptures – is belatedly being recognised as an extended study of individuality amidst the “web of observation between surveillant, subject and state”. East German art, says a writer, hasn’t disappeared, it is “a part of our collective memory”.