On the banks of a glacial river high in the Swiss Alps, in a subterranean stone room among the remnants of a 12th-century Benedictine monastery, one can find the photographs of Gabriele Stötzer.The images are small and rudimentary, often overexposed and frayed at the edges. The artist is young, often unclothed, her body bound in lacerating twine or covered in a clear, viscous fluid. She painted directly onto portraits of herself or her friends; flowers sprout from the nude body of Nora, a companion. Satanic figures rise like ashen smoke from a hand as it holds the yolk of an egg. From a glass case, ceramic eyes stare out—pupils wide, nerves like vines—on stalks that connect to a limp, lifeless tongue.What would the young Gabriele make of such a display? I ask Stötzer over coffee in Zurich the day before the exhibition, titled “Mit Hand & Fuss, Haut & Haar (With Hand & Foot, Skin & Hair)”, opened at Muzeum Susch. She smiles at the thought.“She would be impressed,” Stötzer told ARTnews. “I think the elemental force of this place would appeal to her.”The museum occupies a site once traversed by pilgrims en route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. In the surrounding meadows, local farmers still speak Romansh, an ancient form of Latin unique to the valley. Yet this place also holds significance for the world’s monied elite. Walk up the Inn River for a day and one soon comes to Davos. Further down the valley sits St. Moritz.Muzeum Susch was founded by Polish entrepreneur Grażyna Kulczyk, who in 2015 excavated more than 10,000 tons of rock from beneath the monastery to create some 15,000 square feet of gallery space. There are chambers, alcoves and rocky crags, some with walls wet from spring water seeping out of the Alps.Kulczyk has used this Gothic setting primarily to highlight the work of women artists from behind the Iron Curtain—those of her generation who were often forced to work in secret, fearful of informants and the glare of official surveillance. “Much of this lived in my cupboards and drawers,” Stötzer said of the work in the exhibition.This is the first time a major institution has dedicated a solo show to Stötzer, an artist forged in the margins of East Germany, her work created in defiance of the unbending patriarchy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the paranoia of the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi.“Gabriele’s work is inseparable from her socio-political context,” Daniel Blochwitz, the show’s curator, told ARTnews. “Some lives seem set on a collision course with power from an early age. I think she was guided by a moral compass that permitted little or no deviation.”Gabriele StötzerDaniel Blochwitz/Courtesy Muzeum SuschStötzer was censored so strenuously that she is only now able to assume her place in the historical canon, Blochwitz said. “She is only just beginning to be recognized as a significant person within global art history.”Born in Emleben in 1953, Stötzer was expelled from university at 23 and soon after sentenced to a year in the Hoheneck women’s prison—infamous for housing political prisoners as well as, in her words, “murderers, violent women, thieves, bank robbers.” Her crime was signing a petition in defense of the exiled singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, or in the words of the GDR, “defamation of the state.”“I understood early that my body was the only medium I had left,” she said. “The one thing I could rely on.”In her memoirs, Stötzer describes how her physique changed while imprisoned. Faced with official indifference to inmate health, the threat of violence, and the sight of women self-harming, she began to lose clumps of hair and her skin turned red and caustic. The title of the Susch exhibition, then, is almost unfathomably personal.“But I was one of the only women in the prison who could talk to everyone,” she said. “Before Hoheneck, I thought only men were capable of murder. But I met many female murderers in prison, and I got to understand what drove them. And I got to know them too. They became my community.”On her release, it became clear she would be deprived of materials, barred from exhibiting in GDR museums, and denied entry to art school. Yet Stötzer worked determinedly in obscurity, alongside the state-sanctioned cultural spaces of the GDR and under the furtive eye of the Stasi, for whom she remained a dissident of increasing interest.“She was stripped of resources and subjected to relentless surveillance,” Blochwitz said.Her photographs were assembled from whatever she could scavenge: sheets for backdrops, shoe polish for makeup, natural light. She made textiles from wool after befriending a local sheep farmer. To get by, she crafted jewelry from scrap metal and sold it at street markets. “I used whatever was around,” she said.Sonia Voss, a French curator instrumental in drawing attention to Stötzer’s work, told ARTnews that the artist was “caught between instincts of self-destruction and the creative potential of the self, by desire, by curiosity for the magic within the female body, by the disruptive power of dreams and fantasies. All this with nothing but a few props: a mirror, a roll of bandage, a bit of paint.”In the early 1980s, Stötzer helped found the radical feminist collective Exterra XX, whose members created Super-8 films and photography series discreetly replicated on office photocopiers and distributed among friends. The group staged fashion shows and experimental performances in apartments, few records of which still exist. Some of her collaborators publicly led heteronormative lives as mothers and wives and held office jobs as secretaries or low-level bureaucrats, but, once in the safety of Stötzer’s flat, they performed unclothed, their bodies covered in paint.“These women didn’t call themselves feminists at the time,” Voss said. “But they were clearly trying to break free from the patriarchy, one that was ruling even in the underground art scene. It was about self-exploration, self-empowerment, finding together, among women, the courage to express one’s desires. They ultimately helped to reshape the socio-political landscape in Germany in the period following the fall of the Wall.”Stötzer also collaborated with men. One friend loved to be photographed in her clothes. She later discovered he was a Stasi informant.“I was shocked, but also not surprised,” she said. “You knew the Stasi were watching. But to find it was someone you had trusted, worked with—that hurt.”The betrayal casts a different light on a 1984 photo series in which the man confidently meets her camera in stockings and heels. Years later, Stötzer discovered that this supposed outsider—known to her only as Winfried—was spying on her.“The Stasi took advantage of the fact he was different,” she said. “They used it against him.”Gabriele Stötzer, aber Heilerde, 1982, 2023. Galerie Gisela Clement.Galerie Gisela Clement/Courtesy Muzeum SuschStötzer’s work developed in parallel to Nan Goldin’s, who would decades later become synonymous with Berlin. Goldin’s breakthrough participation in the 1981 exhibition New York/New Wave at MoMA PS1—then called P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center—coincided with the creation of many of Stötzer’s works on view at Susch. Their art shares much, but Stötzer was unaware of her contemporary across the Atlantic.“East German artists, especially women like Gabriele, had fewer opportunities to engage with outside ideas,” Kulczyk said in a statement. “Her experience was marked by a double isolation—from state-sanctioned East German art and from the West.”Stötzer’s role extended beyond her studio. In December 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, she took part in the occupation of the Stasi headquarters in Erfurt, helping to preserve vital surveillance archives from destruction.“I wanted to take my personal file,” she recalled, “but then I saw all the other files—rows and rows. You want to believe in people and be openhearted and not suspecting. But it made me realize what people are capable of.” She described how her group blocked the doors with their bodies, demanding that the files be protected. “I thought, even if they shoot us, at least I’ve done something right.”In recent years, Stötzer’s work has gradually begun to receive mainstream recognition. She was awarded the Federal Republic of Germany’s Order of Merit in 2013, and her photographs were included in documenta 14 in 2017 and in the Voss-curated “Restless Bodies: East German Photography 1980–1989” at Rencontres d’Arles in 2019. In 2023, her work played a central role in the exhibition “Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she stood out among nearly 100 artists working across Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.Stötzer’s art reminds us that aesthetics and politics are indivisible—that defiance is lived not only in protests but in the materials we choose, the words we use, the acts we record.“Feelings, thoughts, passions, they exist in every society,” Stötzer said. “No matter—they are always present, and they can’t be stopped.”Gabriele Stötzer: Mit Hand & Fuss, Haut & Haar is on view at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland through November 2.