Gabriele Stötzer

Since the beginning of her career, Gabriele Stötzer (born 1953 in Emleben, Germany) 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.
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.