Doris Ziegler (born 14 March 1949)[1] is a German painter whose work responded to and engaged with the Wende and the peaceful revolution in the GDR during the late 1980s.
Life
Ziegler was born in Weimar, Thuringia, Germany and studied painting at the School of Visual Arts/Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig from 1969 to 1974 under Werner Tübke und Wolfgang Mattheuer.[2] From 1972 to 1981, she was married to the painter Thomas Ziegler [de]. The marriage brought forth a son (born 1977). In 1989, she was an assistant in the Painting department at the School of Visual Arts/Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. From 1993 to 2014, she served as a professor at the school.[3] Doris Ziegler lives in Leipzig.
Work
The first figurative paintings emerged in the former GDR during the 1970s. Ziegler mainly focused on portraits and cityscapes. Triggered by her mother's disorder, between 1999 and 2005 she focused on the situations of Alzheimer's patients who were required to spend the end of their lives in a retirement home.[4]
At the end of the 1980s, Ziegler's paintings dealt with demonstrations and crowds, such as Passage 1 (1988, Oil on canvas, 160 x 175 cm) or Aufbruch Straße (1989, Oil on canvas, 120 x 130 cm), which were created in the time of upheaval leading up to the Fall of the Berlin Wall.[5] Her series "Passage pictures" between the years 1988 and 1993 addressed the Wende and the peaceful revolution in the GDR as well as the upheaval in Leipzig. The picture cycle has been included in the exhibition Point of no Return: Transformation and Revolution in East German Art since July 2019 in the Museum of Fine Arts in the room dedicated to Leipzig.[6][7]
Contours. Works by GDR Artists born in 1949. Exhibition on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the GDR. National Gallery from October 5 to December 3, 1989. State Museum Berlin, 1989.
April Eisman, “From Doppelbelastung to Doppelgänger: Doris Ziegler’s Paintings of Women in East Germany,” in Deborah Barnstone, ed. The Double in Art (London: Peter Lang, 2016), 45-66.
Paul Kaiser, ed. Doris Ziegler. Das Passagen-Werk. Malerei (Dresden: Tympanon, 2020). Authors include Paul Kaiser , Thomas Bille, Ina Gille, Eckhart Gillen, Claudia Petzold, Judith Hoffmann, April Eisman, Katrin Arrieta, Ulrike Kremeier, Katrin Kunert, Annika Michalski, Meinhard Michael, Ingeborg Ruthe, Dietulf Sander, Ines Thate-Keler.
