Albertinum acquires a key painting by Doris Ziegler, giving voice to the quiet tensions of late GDR life
Doris Ziegler, Aufbruch Straße, 1988 © Albertinum | GNM, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Foto: Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025.
DRESDEN.—
The Albertinum in Dresden has added a powerful and long-overdue work to its collection: Aufbruch Straße (1988) by Leipzig-based painter Doris Ziegler. Acquired with the support of the Kulturstiftung der Länder and its Friends’ Association, the painting strengthens the museum’s holdings of art from the former GDR—an area that still carries significant gaps, especially when it comes to women artists.
At first glance, Aufbruch Straße feels restrained and subdued. But beneath its surface lies a dense emotional charge. Painted just one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the work captures the sense of paralysis, uncertainty, and quiet anticipation that marked the final years of the East German state. It is not a loud or overtly political image. Instead, it speaks through atmosphere—through a feeling of being stuck, waiting, and longing for change without yet knowing what form that change might take.
Doris Ziegler, born in Weimar in 1949, studied and later taught at Leipzig’s renowned Academy of Visual Arts. Throughout her career, she focused on everyday scenes, women’s experiences, and self-portraits that deliberately resisted the officially sanctioned optimism of socialist realism. Her paintings do not idealize life in the GDR; they observe it closely, seriously, and without embellishment. In doing so, they become quietly political—records of lived experience rather than slogans.
Aufbruch Straße belongs to a group of works known as Ziegler’s “Passages” series, which explore moments of transition and emotional standstill. The painting reflects a society caught between resignation and hope, between conformity and the desire to break free. Feelings of uncertainty, indifference, fear, and muted resistance coexist within the image, making it a sensitive snapshot of a historical moment just before everything changed.
Looking back, the work now reads almost prophetically. Ziegler herself later described the painting as an attempt to imagine something that felt impossible at the time: the idea of publicly expressing dissent, of movement after years of stagnation. That this imagined “departure” would become reality only months later was something few could have predicted.
For the Albertinum, the acquisition represents more than just adding an important artwork. It is a statement about responsibility. As museum director Hilke Wagner notes, preserving the cultural legacy of the GDR—especially its nonconformist and critical voices—is a central task, and one that remains unfinished. Works by women artists, in particular, have too often been overlooked.
Now on view alongside works by artists such as Wolfgang Mattheuer, Werner Tübke, and Barbara Kruger, Aufbruch Straße takes its place within a broader conversation about art, history, and memory. It offers visitors not a dramatic narrative of revolution, but something quieter and perhaps more honest: a reflection of how change often begins—not with certainty, but with doubt, tension, and the fragile hope that something else might be possible.
