“I have been drawing and painting my entire life. I started taking life drawing classes in grey communist East Berlin at the age of 14. I was selected by the local school authorities to partake in extra-curricular art activities but there was no room for “Freischaffende Kuenstler” – independent artists – in East Germany. The plan economy called for industrial designers, which would have been my destiny if I had stayed in East Germany.

I grew up under constant Stasi surveillance. My divorced mother, desperate to escape the imprisonment of East Germany, started gambling with our welfare and safety by liaising with Westerners when I was about 7 years old.

I remember returning home from a holiday and finding our apartment had been searched. The Stasi, the East German Secret Police, had gone through all of our belongings. It didn’t seem they were trying to hide the fact. Instead they’d been making coffee and left all evidence behind.

My father had run-ins with the Stasi whilst doing his military service near the border. On a drunken night he told his best friend, that he was wondering what it would be like to jump that wall, even though he would never actually follow through on this notion. The next day he was given 20 minutes to pack his bags and was moved to a different post in the country. Everybody was reporting on everyone else.

On another occasion my mother had been taken in for an interrogation. She was held for 24 hours and was threatened with ‘losing her children’ if she didn’t co-operate and give up information on the Westerners she was seeing.

As a child I was blissfully unaware of any of the gruesome things my parents endured and happily joined the Red Pioneers, a communist youth organisation established to gently prepare children for a life dedicated to communism. It was during this period and as a member of this organization that I witnessed firsthand, communist propaganda art. Many school excursions led to the Palace of the Republic with its extensive art collection of epic paintings of activists, sport heroes and freedom fighters, war heroes, soviet cosmonauts and more. Through these excursions I was also introduced to the German romantics like Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Spitzweg, whose art were hailed in both East Germany as well as during the fascist regime in pre-war Nazi Germany. I had never seen an abstract painting. It was not until I was 17 that I learned about abstract art at the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark. Abstract art was banned as being bourgeois and capitalist, privileged to only a few, not for the people.

Eventually, we were able to leave the country, and moved to Scandinavia two years before the wall finally came down in 1989.

Those early childhood experiences, such as living under constant surveillance and being integrated into the communist youth organisation heavily influenced my life and later, my path as an artist.

Art for me became a kind of escape from reality. Sometimes a Western relative would smuggle in a Western fashion magazine and I would devour it in secret, dreaming of places far away, beautiful dresses, jewellery and luxury.

This imagery would then fill my canvases; the paintings becoming an act of rebellion.

For a long time I shunned my past. I remember lying about my origin when people asked me. I did not want people to view me as the poor cousin from the East, nor did I want them to ask questions and label me as ignorant, brainwashed or naïve. I didn’t want to be judged by where I came from - stereotyped.

It is not until recently, that I have fully embraced my roots and my history. I realise now that I had witnessed an important part of our history.

The result is that I now bring the heroines from my childhood back onto canvas albeit in a slightly altered form. My heroines are a satirical take on the propaganda images I was surrounded by. They are by no means meant to be taken seriously or meant to be a historical depiction of the time. I happily blend eras, countries and symbolism to create an eclectic mish-mash of propaganda and pin-up. I am experimenting with different mediums and am currently working on a series of paintings on Perspex that include stenciling and graffiti spray painting. I am using this technique to replicate some of the poster style art I saw during my childhood.

Art in East Germany was never decorative only, all art had a purpose to educate and inform and deliver a message to the people.“ 

－Kathrin Longhurst