Annemirl Bauer
1939 – 1989 / East German painter & regime critic
“Women, if we do nothing today, tomorrow we will live like the day before yesterday.”
Annemirl Bauer was the daughter of the painter Tina Bauer-Pezellen and the Bauhaus photographer Siegbert Bauer. She grew up in Weimar, studied at (among other places) the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, worked as a freelance painter and graphic artist, and died shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – after years of so-called “decomposition measures” (i.e., psychological terror) conducted by GDR State Security in East Berlin.
Womanly and worldly
Throughout her life, Annemirl Bauer’s painting drew upon her own worldly and womanly sensitivities and state of mind. In her work, she focused on single mothers, the entrenched stereotypes and roles of the genders, environmental destruction, the lives lost due to the inner-German border, and the manifold constrictions experienced as a woman and as a citizen of a country that refused to let her out into the rest of the world.
The hidden oeuvre
She dreamt of a more-feminine government and of a life in unspoiled nature. Following her expulsion from the GDR Association of Visual Artists and banishment from practising her profession, she fled to the countryside of Lower Fläming to escape the constant state surveillance. And this is where her life’s work is still found today, awaiting discovery. Some paintings are already available to the public, but a scholarly overview of her oeuvre has yet to be undertaken.
Many thanks to the author of this text, Amrei Bauer.