Artist Talk with Gertraude Pohl about art in the public space in the GDR extd.

Organized by Beate Söntgen and Julian Volz

The artistic practice of Gertraude Pohl, born in Zittau in 1940, is closely linked to (semi-)public space. After graduating from the Berlin Weissensee School of Art, the designer began realizing artistic projects in the context of architectural work in interior and exterior spaces. These include the floor inlay she created in the main foyer of the Palast der Republik in Berlin in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s, she expanded her artistic practice to include large-scale gable paintings, enamel wall paintings, and mosaics made of concrete formstones on the exterior walls of buildings. Particularly noteworthy are the enamel wall paintings that Pohl was able to create for VEB Radio-Stern in the mid-1980s. With these, she made a decisive break with socialist realism and instead turned to an abstract formal language. The pictures were created as part of a comprehensive “work environment design” for the newly built Radio-Stern plant in collaboration with architects, urban planners and other artist colleagues. Already in the GDR, but especially after its end, she had to experience numerous “attacks and interventions in my work on and with architecture and in public space in many variants” (Pohl). She countered these interventions with several public installations and interventions.

In the conversation, Gertraude Pohl will discuss the development of her own formal language, art production in public space in the GDR, and her engagement against the devaluation of her art and that of numerous East German colleagues after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The event is part of the seminar „Gemalte Manifeste. Wandbilder vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute“ and is taking place in cooperation with the Research Training Group.