Karla Woisnitza

Karla Woisnitza must be acknowledged as one of the most influential protagonists of the non-conformist scene in the GDR – even if the petite, rebellious woman always stayed in the background and remains unknown to most people today. At the age of just 17, Woisnitza’s artistic godmother Erika Stürmer-Alex initiated her into an alternative art scene around Berlin-Rüdersdorf, sensitized her to an immanently experimental notion of what art is, and inspired her to blur and merge genres and materials. The one constant in Woisnitza’s work, liberated of all boundaries and definitions, is her open mind and readiness for exchange. Her oeuvre covers a wide span, from etchings and ink drawings with archaic symbolism to humorous and highly contemporary collages, as well as installations and environments charged with an explosive and critical power.  

Following a traineeship in stage decoration in East Berlin and working as assistant set designer in Halle (Saale), Karla Woisnitza in 1973 commenced a five-year program studying stage and costume design with the artistic free spirit Günter Hornig at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden. In mid-1978, she withdrew from the program when the school refused to let her change her area of specialization shortly before the final exams. Seen as a talented young designer, Woisnitza was nevertheless admitted to the Verband Bildender Künstler. As a result, she began to receive commissions and give exhibitions in what Habermas would call the primary public sphere of the GDR, while at the same time becoming active in art scenes and productions of the secondary sphere – in both Berlin and Dresden.  

After moving to Berlin in 1980, Woisnitza worked from home while caring for two children. But she also organized sale-oriented exhibitions and artist parties in her disused atelier. Transborder networks and collective actions were to become the pet mission of this artist, who was constantly spied upon and hampered by the state: Woisnitza was co-initiator, for instance, of the legendary Türen-Ausstellung (Doors Exhibition) of 1979 in Dresden’s Leonhardi-Museum. In 1982, she was a member of the working group of non-conforming artists, which with its Frühstück im Freien (Plein-Air Breakfast) dared to launch a sensual and resistance-spirited counter-exhibition to the state-commissioned art presented in the IXth Art Exhibition at Dresden’s Albertinum. For this act of engagement, and many others no doubt, the Archive of the Akademie der Künste in 2005 acquired parts of Woisnitza’s correspondence and writings, including her illustrated diaries, which give us a tactile, visual, and poignant insight into the alternative art scene of the GDR.  

In them, we learn about Woisnitza’s scenic readings of, e.g., Ilse Aichinger’s Spiegelgeschichte (Mirror Story) or her sound and image collages such as The last Waltz, in which, through performance, she revolts against society and especially its patriarchal structures. Woisnitza’s Face Painting Action of 1978, in which she turned the faces of artist friends such as Cornelia Schleime or Christine Schlegel into a canvas for abstract geometric paintings, was in the view of Angelika Richter the first presumably self-organized body-action-art event produced by a female artist group in the GDR.[1] Throughout her life, Woisnitza’s work was inspired and dominated by female figures from antiquity as well as from contemporary literature. This may be one reason why she has never been absent from the numerous feminist retrospective exhibitions mounted since 1989.[2] While critics may refer to her work dismissively with the term "women’s art", Woisnitza prefers to speak of tenderness. During GDR times, Woisnitza often suffered from the State’s requirement that art serve a utilitarian purpose. Even now, several decades after the fall of the Wall, she remains true to her convictions: More than ever in a day and age when ideas may be freely chosen, Karla Woisnitza continues to make intuitive works, which float in space with no fixed ties to an overriding concept, which ignore the classes of low and high art, which mingle or juxtapose abstract and figurative formal languages, and refuse to affix or conform to any of the labels so widespread in the art market today.

text: Sylvie Kürsten, translation: Darrell Wilkins

[1] Richter, Angelika: Das Gesetz der Szene. Genderkritik, Performance Art und zweite Öffentlichkeit in der späten DDR, 2019, p.199.   

[2] i.e. „Medea Muckt auf. Radikale Künstlerinnen hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang“, Dresden 2018/2019; „Worin unsere Stärke besteht. 50 Künstlerinnen aus der DDR “, Berlin 2022.