I am You!

The exhibition takes its name from one of Doris Ziegler’s main works. At the time of its creation, it was considered a provocation because it supposedly imported Western feminist positions into the art space of the GDR. In that work the artist presents herself in androgynous form, both male and female, thus questioning the prevailing gender roles – a long time before today’s acceptance of current debates about sex, gender and diversity. The exhibition also reveals that the pictorial staging of a “doppelgänger” also applies to other segments of Ziegler’s work. The painting Selbst mit Sohn II (Self with Son II, 1986 / 87), which was shown at the 10th Art Exhibition of the GDR in the Albertinum in Dresden, was one of the last GDR art scandals.
 

Doris Ziegler’s Passage Series (1988 – 1993), which makes up the core of her oeuvre, bundles the experiences of a social transformation for which there are no historical parallels. Its ‘snapshots’ meld into an artistic panorama of conditions before the turnaround and upheaval in the political sphere. In the paintings making up that group of works, it is the artist herself who encounters the turbulences of the events in the guise of a melancholic Pierrot.