Gabriele Stötzer – Körpergesten und leibliche Zeichen | Fotografie
February 01 – April 16, 2023
Galerie Pankow
Part of EMOP Berlin
Thu – Fri | 12 – 8 PM
Sat – Sun | 2 – 8 PM
Opening: Tuesday, January 31, 2023 | 7 – 9 PM
Catalog presentation
02.03.2023 | 7 PM
Artist Talk: Angelika Richter & Gabriele Stötzer
16.03.2023 | 7 PM
Film screening: 'Rebels – Photograohy. Underground. GDR'
30.03.2023 | 7 PM
Closing: Guided tour with Gabriele Stötzer
16.04.2023 | 4 PM
LOOCK Galerie, together with Galerie Pankow, is pleased to present the solo exhibition Körpergesten und leibliche Zeichen | Fotografie by Gabriele Stötzer. With her artistic self-explorations and self-assertions, the artist has been acting as a woman, writer and visual artist since the late 1970s and has had to assert herself time and again against cultural, social as well as political resistance. Whether painting, drawing, photography, ceramics, or textile art, whether performance, films, texts, or fashion objects—Stötzer's works are directed not only against an erasure of the individual personality pursued by the GDR system of the time, but also against common gender roles and cultural norms.
Stötzer staged herself and other female protagonists in front of the camera and developed an idiosyncratic form of artistic practice that identifies photography as a performative act. Her "dishonest way of photographing," as Stötzer herself put it, follows a random, almost unconsciously self-creative act. In self-experimentation, Stötzer has found her way to performative photography with other women: "With them I can also add up, potentiate, alienate, come from the individual [...] to the general analysis of our being." She also calls her images "touch photos."
Stötzer makes bodies speak by weaving her figures into social sculptures that act like mysterious sign systems out of the image into space and ultimately into our lives. This exhibition is dedicated to Stötzer's photographic representations of self and body. On display in addition are thematic manuscript texts, two artist's books, two Super 8 films from the 1980s, and two recent large-scale sculptures.
The exhibition will be accompanied by two film screenings, an artist talk, and a catalog and its presentation.