Name: Annegret Soltau
Start: 2025-05-08
End: 2025-08-17
Location: Städel Museum

The body is political—as the work of artist Annegret Soltau (b. 1946) impressively demonstrates. Her art has been causing a stir since the 1970s and remains as relevant as ever. With more than eighty works, the exhibition offers a comprehensive insight into her multifaceted oeuvre, which ranges from drawings to extended photography, video and installation. Among them are groundbreaking works from Soltau’s studio, some of which are being exhibited for the first time.

Your Visit

10 am–6 pm Opened today
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Entry From €16 / €14, €9 Tue from 3 pm
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Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
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About the Exhibition

Long considered an insider’s tip despite her art historical significance, Soltau’s work is now regarded as one of the most important positions in feminist photography and body art. Over the course of more than five decades and in the face of much opposition, Soltau’s independent, radically feminist visual language has established her as an indispensable voice in contemporary art. The Städel Museum is dedicating the first retrospective to her, developed in collaboration with the artist.

Annegret Soltau uses the body, her own self, as a venue for negotiating social structures. With her radical photo-sewing, she has created an entirely new artistic language and established the female body as a medium of self-empowerment.

Svenja Grosser, Head of Contemporary Art and curator of the exhibition, Städel Museum

Annegret Soltau (*1946)
Divided MOTHER-Column, 1980/81
Annegret Soltau (*1946)
Surgical operations II, 11.10.2001, 2001
Annegret Soltau (*1946)
Enclosed, 1973

Central themes in Soltau’s work include feminism, body politics and the challenge of human and female identity. To this end, she has developed her own innovative techniques that transcend the boundaries of photography—photo-sewing, photo-restitching and photo-etching. In her self-portraits, Soltau questions female role models and sheds light on social norms by visualizing complex emotional worlds, inner conflicts and emotional states. Since the late 1970s, she has devoted herself to an artistic exploration of pregnancy and motherhood—themes that have been underrepresented in art for centuries and have only recently begun to receive increasing attention in both society and the art world. Her work is also a poignant expression of the ageing of the female body and questions of mortality. Soltau’s work has repeatedly been subject to public censorship; her depictions deviate from established aesthetic conventions and are perceived as provocative. The exhibition at the Städel Museum is an important corrective to this reception and a long overdue tribute to this great feminist and artist.

The exhibition presents important loans from renowned institutions such as the Sammlung Verbund in Vienna, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, the Lenbachhaus in Munich and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe complete the exhibition.

Curator
Svenja Grosser, Head of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum

Project Manager
Maja Lisewski, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Städel Museum