Exhibition "East from West" | A howling Honecker

Sandwiched between historic German dates, from October 3 to November 9, 2025, 35 years after the end of the GDR, the group exhibition "East from West" will be on view at the Kreuzberg project space "Schau Fenster" on Lobeckstraße, not far from the Berlin Wall. Over the past year and a half, curator Jan Kage has conducted interviews with artists born in the GDR. FluxFM broadcast the conversations, and the art magazine "Monopol" later reprinted them. The big question that Bonn-born Kage posed to his guests was whether there was such a thing as "Eastern art." The interviewees were divided.

The works now collected in "Schau Fenster" are by no means comparable. The participants completed their training, at least initially, in GDR institutions, and each follows their own path.

In the center of the room are two paintings by Else Gabriel. She is now a professor at the Berlin-Weißensee Art Academy. In the early 1980s, as a student in Dresden, she was involved with the auto-perforation artists, who, in their performances, dressed in S&M-like outfits, handled blood and bones, among other things. She is primarily represented in the exhibition with a painting called "Muses 2.0." It depicts the (West German) art theorist Wolfgang Ullrich and the (East German) painter Neo Rauch, who were involved in a major controversy a few years ago. Gabriel is used to riots and paints the two without playing referee.

In conversation with Kage, she explains: "So when you have a vacuole like the GDR, an appendage, a vermiform appendage, and then within this appendage a bulge in this loop of the Elbe, like a diverticulum in the rectum of socialism, then you have little to lose. Who cares. The last one out turns off the lights. They're all going to the West anyway. I want to, too! But until then, we'll keep making a fuss here, always in such a way that they can't get us."

Gabriel's auto-perforation colleague Via Lewandowsky has provided two objects: a bobbing guitar with a broken string, supposedly belonging to Wolf Biermann and titled "The End of the Song." And a portrait of Honecker letting water out of his eyes via a hose. Both are examples of rebellious attempts from their era to combat stuffiness and repression.

Andreas Mühe, born in 1979 and descended from a famous family of artists, was warned by his teacher as a child: "If you go over there, you mustn't eat anything, because you'll poison yourself." At night, he photographed a residential building in the Wandlitz forest settlement, where, as is well known, the members of the SED Politburo lived.

Architecture is also Andrea Pichl's subject. Through photography, film, and installations, she explores the language of facades, the nature of vestibules, and abandoned commercial buildings, depicting history as a palimpsest, how buildings tell of the demise of systems.

"They're all going to the West anyway. But until then, we'll keep making a fuss here, always in a way that makes it impossible for them to get us."

Else Gabriel artist

The painter Christian Thoelke, whose works are currently on display at the "Minsk" in Potsdam and at the Volksbank Art Forum, contributed a drawing, "Durchblick klein," depicting white birch trunks against the gray balconies of prefabricated buildings. Even though state bodies decided what was exhibited in the GDR, he emphasized in conversation with Kage: "You'll find fewer people in the East who say from the outset: I don't know anything about it [art], I can't say anything about it. Access to it was much more accessible. People simply feel a connection to it."

His Radeberg colleague Thomas Scheibitz, who trained as a stonemason and became internationally famous and successful in the 1990s, says: "Commissioned art or art commissioned by a state or its organs or institutions is never quite on point."

The works on display in the exhibition "East from West" are perhaps "on point" because they don't give the impression that they operate with externally imposed certainties or pseudo-viewpoints, that they are overly focused on a static East-West discourse, or that they are trying to please. The participants seek images in which the political past and art history have not been erased, but nevertheless point toward a future that has not yet been determined.

“East from West,” until November 9 at Schau Fenster, Space for Art, Lobeckstraße 30–35, Berlin.