Erika Stürmer-Alex

Erika Stürmer-Alex, born 1938 in Wriezen in eastern Brandenburg, has for many decades been one of the most prominent artist personalities in Brandenburg, where she was awarded the art prize of her Bundesland. She studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee through 1963, orienting herself towards German Expressionism and towards the free-spirited painting of her expressionist and abstract colleagues in the West. She created works for Kunst am Bau (Art in Buildings), ensuring for instance that inhabitants of the soul-less modern housing complexes in the city of Eberswalde could recognize their homes among the monotonous apartment blocks by dint of friendly signs. In 1982, she co-founded, with kindred spirits in Oderbruch bei Seelow, the producer gallery “Kunsthof Lietzen.” She belonged to the circle of non-conformist spirits who supported the reform movement of the final years of the GDR. Two years after the fall of the Wall, she was also co-founder of the non-profit organization Endmoräne – Künstlerinnen aus Brandenburg und Berlin e. V. (Terminal moraine – Women Artists from Brandenburg and Berlin). Although it is a simplification, one could describe her work as painter and sculptor stylistically as Neo-Expressionist. Her extraordinary oeuvre, with its at first glance almost inconceivable richness and diversity, stands as paradigm of an entire era in the cultural zone of East Germany – a zone and an era whose significance is still today far from adequately explored and appreciated. As almost nowhere else, her work reveals a powerful gesture towards an existential art – one which liberates itself unflinchingly from the dogma of high art and its clearly defined canon. Stürmer-Alex blasted the hierarchies of medium and genre even during GDR times, contradicting the prevalent cultural policies and often enough leaving her viewers baffled. The “Wild Old Woman” thus encouraged an entire younger generation to give shape to an expressive, emotional art that ignored all the dogmas of Socialist Realism. She asserted herself with color-field painting, with gestural and abstract painting, as well as with her scurrilous-humorous sculptures, in which we may recognize a sensual and at the same time deeply funny affinity of spirits with the colorful, feminist-chick sculptures of the French-Swiss artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

text: Ingeborg Ruthe, translation: Darrell Wilkins