Gabriele Stötzer – Beginnen im Rinnen der Zeit

June 20 – August 22, 2026

Opening | Friday, June 19, 2026 | 3 – 8 PM 

Wed – Sat | 12 – 6 PM
 
When I was in my mother’s old house, which I plan to turn into a studio, I told the friends helping me that upstairs, where we had slept as children with a chamber pot at night, I wanted a toilet beside a wall-mounted washbasin, without a partition. They were astonished that I did not want any screen or barrier. To impress them, I bought a toilet bowl, painted it, and had it fired in a ceramicist’s kiln. Disguised as an art object, it was accepted.

Yet afterwards I began to wonder: where did my ease with a toilet bowl freely standing in a room come from?

Then it came back to me: in the Stasi pre-trial detention cell in Erfurt, where I was held for five months in 1977 awaiting my trial, the toilet bowl stood beside the washbasin, table, and bed, and had to be used by everyone confined there. I then returned to my former cell in Erfurt and photographed a toilet beside the prison door. (Gabriele Stötzer, Recurring Knowledge, June 2026)

LOOCK Galerie is delighted to announce Beginnen im Rinnen der Zeit, an exhibition featuring work by Gabriele Stötzer. Through artistic acts of self-exploration and self-assertion, Stötzer is repeatedly confronting and resisting cultural, social, and political constraints. Her newest work schwungvoll in linien (2026), a painted Meissner porcelain toilette that addresses her time in Hoheneck, a women’s prison in East Germany, is displayed in the heart of the gallery space. It will be shown alongside drawings from the 1980s until today. The exhibition Beginnen im Rinnen der Zeit will be on view until August 22, 2026.

Gabriele Stötzer (*1953 in Emleben, Thuringia) lives and works in Erfurt, Germany. The artist received the Pauli–Prize Bremen in 2024 and was awarded the renowned Kaiserring Goslar this year.

Stötzer has had exhibitions at MUZEUM SUSCH, Switzerland; Kunststiftung DZ Bank, Frankfurt am Main; Berlin Biennale; Deutsches Hygiene Museum Dresden (2025); Kunsthaus Erfurt (2024); Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, USA (2024, 2023); Phoenix Art Museum, USA; Vancouver Art Gallery, Kanada; Galerie Pankow, Berlin; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania (2023); neue Gesellschaft für bildende Künste, Berlin (2022); GfZK Leipzig (2019); and Klassikstiftung Weimar (2013).

Works by Gabriele Stötzer belong to the following collections: Berlinische Galerie, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin; Harvard Art Museums/Busch Reisinger Museum, Cambridge; Bundeskunstsammlung für zeitgenössischer Kunst; Kunsthalle Bremen; DZ Bank Kunststiftung, Frankfurt am Main; Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Staatliches Museum Schwerin;  Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; Klassik Stiftung Weimar; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München; SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hasso Plattner Foundation, Potsdam; and Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop.

Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen 

Gropius Bau Berlin 

16.06.–06.12.2026

Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen

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. Opening at Gropius Bau in June 2026, Dabei sein und nicht schweigen (Showing up and Not Remaining Silent) will be 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. With around 150 works, the exhibition highlights the diversity of her œuvre – encompassing painting, literature, photography, textile art, Super 8 film, performance and public interventions – and intends to catalyse the long-overdue broader recognition of this groundbreaking artist.

Curated by Julia Grosse, Independent Curator, with Christopher Wierling, Assistant Curator, Gropius Bau; Concept: Julia Grosse and Franziska Schmidt, Director, Tempelhof-Schöneberg Municipal Galleries, Exhibition Management: Sophie Winckler, Project Management, with Lisa Bockius, Exhibitions Fellow

The exhibition will be on view at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach from 14 March to 26 September 2027. Gabriele Stötzer: Dabei sein und nicht schweigen is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation