Escape and Escapism - Art and the GDR

A free one-day symposium organised to coincide with the exhibition ‘Escape from Colditz’ by Leipzig-based artist Annette Schröter at the Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. An international array of speakers will discuss creative legacies in Visual Arts, Architecture, Photography, Film, Dance and Literature from the GDR

10.00 am – Introduction and Welcome

Silke Mentchen, University of Cambridge & co-curator ‘Escape from Colditz’

10.15 am – Two Who Escaped: Georg Baselitz and A R Penck

Richard Calvocoressi, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge.

10.45 am – The DDR in the Humboldt Forum: Wolfgang Mattheuer’s Painting Guten Tag

Neil MacGregor, Former Director, British Museum (London) & Humboldt Forum (Berlin)

11.15 am – Break for lunch (own arrangements) and visit to the exhibition

1.30 pm – Christa Wolf ’s Juninachmittag

Georgina Paul, University of Oxford

2.00 pm – ‘Escape to Rabbit Land’ – Escape and Inner Emigration in GDR and (post) GDR Photography

Matthew Shaul, Queen Mary University of London & co-curator ‘Escape from Colditz’

2.30 pm – Break

3.00 pm – Cybernetics and Simulacra: Remediating Halle-Neustadt Public Art

Stefan Ehrig, University of Glasgow

3.30 pm – Was Bleibt? The Politics of East German Dance

Marion Kant, University of Cambridge

4.00 pm – 5 pm – Final Discussion

The symposium will be held in the Robert Cripps Auditorium, in Cripps Court at 3​ Chesterton Road, Cambridge, CB4 3AD. Attendees are welcome to stop by the College's main Porters' Lodge on Magdalene St for directions.

Escape from Colditz - Papercuts, Collage and Installation

Annette Schröter

25 October 2025 – 9 January 2026

The Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College, Cambridge is delighted to announce the upcoming exhibition by Leipzig-based artist Annette Schröter (Meissen, Germany, 1956), co-curated and co-organised by Silke Mentchen, Magdalene College and Matthew Shaul, Director, Departure Lounge Contemporary Art.

Inspired in part by her origins near Colditz Castle in Germany and by the tales of wartime derring-do immortalised in the 1970s BBC TV series “Colditz”, Escape from Colditz is a contemplation on the theme of escape or escapism presented in a unique series of papercuts and collage.

Annette Schröter was trained as a porcelain painter at the German Democratic Republic’s State Porcelain Works in Meissen before studying fine art at the prestigious High School for Graphics and Book Design in Leipzig between 1977-82. Growing up and training in the GDR, much of her work is a response to both the state’s idealised propaganda and the quiet resistance to it that was part of everyday life. She critiques the GDR’s ‘escapist kitsch’— the officially sanctioned, idealised portrayals of rural life that were central to socialist mythology. At the same time, she explores more personal forms of escapism, like artistic practice, gardening, weekend retreats, and traditional handicrafts. These activities offered citizens a form of "inner emigration”, a way to retreat from the harsh realities of environmental depletion, industrial exploitation, and constant surveillance that were part of the daily experience in the socialist state.

Growing up on the edge of Meissen, a small town firmly rooted in the Saxon countryside, Schröter’s motifs are also inspired by the long antagonism in German history between the mythologies and motifs of the land and those of urban/industrial modernity. Arranged in what she describes as ‘family groups’ her papercuts and collages include home-made allotment gates, scarecrows and the glories of summer gardens. The papercuts are complemented by a series of assemblages and small installations that celebrate Schröter’s collections of GDR folk art, handicrafts, popular culture and kitsch – which she uses as visual prompts for her practice.

Schröter’s hugely ambitious papercuts and collages – which she started to produce in 2003 – are drawn from a range of sources, her own (often comically banal) photographs, images she finds in magazines, in the daily press and on television, or those that she imagines inspired by news reports on the radio. Her complex works pose huge questions about the extent to which – even as an artist, independent thinker and in Schröter’s case an opponent of the GDR’s political regime – we are affected by the state’s visual grammar and its iconographic hegemonies.

Exhibition Opening Times

Open: Monday to Friday 2pm – 4pm; Saturday 2pm – 6pm

Closed: Sunday

To access the exhibition, please call in via the Porters' Lodge on Magdalene Street.

Header image:

Mann im Baum 6 (Man in tree), 2024, Annette Schröter.

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Host or Publisher The Robert Cripps Gallery, Magdalene College