Dreaming: Annemirl Bauer and Bärbel Bohley

Annemirl Bauer’s artwork is closely intertwined with her autobiography. Born in Jena in 1939, she began her training as a ceramicist and toy designer at a young age. Whenever possible, she travelled – to France, Bulgaria, Spain and Czechoslovakia. After her second trip to France, she enrolled at university, where she completed her degree in 1964. As a graduate of an Art Academy, she was automatically a member of the Artists’ Association. Bauer soon became a critical voice against the GDR’s dogmatic art system. As a single mother, she lived in precarity and was a victim of the Stasi’s so-called Zersetzungsmaßnahmen, or the methods of psychological warfare employed against political dissidents. Her artwork incorporates colourful, figurative realism into expressive, unmediated drawings. She painted and drew constantly on various surfaces, producing portraits of numerous colleagues including Bärbel Bohley – who defended Bauer when the VBK attempted to oust her, and became active in the VBK herself.

Bauer repeatedly protested the GDR’s travel restrictions and the draft for women. In 1984, she openly pushed for all travel restrictions to be lifted, which led the Stasi to sanction her with a professional ban and further repressive measures. She died of cancer at the age of 50, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Bohley stepped away from art for good that same year. She responded to a request for a print with the line, “Sometimes, art is absent!” – her final gesture as an artist. From then on, she was active as a politician in the New Forum at the East German “Round Table”, or the process of peaceful revolution that ultimately led to the GDR’s dissolution and Germany’s reunification. This role brought her national recognition. The idea of bringing people together at one table to initiate change can be viewed as her true artwork. Bohley’s work spans prints, drawings and paintings that focus on human beings – the individual as part of a group, or isolated from it. This is her way of placing the communist ideology, according to which a single person flourishes as part of a collective, in opposition to the individual.

The ZfK’s collection does not include any of Bauer’s artworks and only a select few of Bohleys; neither ever held an exhibition at Galerie im Turm. Founded in 1965, the gallery at Berlin’s Frankfurter Tor was closely connected to the VBK. Dreaming: Annemirl Bauer and Bärbel Bohley seeks to close this gap and amend the chapter of history that intentionally excluded these artists, honouring their defiant work. In 2010 a public square was named after Annemirl Bauer; Bärbel Bohley has yet to be officially recognised as a visual artist.