When encountering the sculptures of Birgit Dieker, it can, in a certain sense, also be seen as an encounter with ourselves. This is because her figures and objects are not made from traditional sculptural materials such as steel, marble, or wood. They are made from fabric, more precisely, from clothing that has already been worn by someone, clothes with their own history, a “second skin,” into which human feelings, physical and emotional states, have been inscribed.

Since 2006, Birgit Dieker has been developing her sculptures from second-hand clothes, sewing and layering them together—then altering and fragmenting them through cuts and openings. Notably, the artist does not just omit body parts in these figures but literally breaks open their bodies in order to get to the core of their “identity.” Beneath the aesthetic, flawless surface that encloses these sculptures like a protective shell, injuries and psychological abysses become visible. For the artist, it is “the search for a self that is veiled beneath many layers of experiences and stories, a kind of ‘peeling away.’”

The similarly arm- and headless Rosie (2007) is one such sculpture. It consists of a perfectly modeled body, hidden beneath countless layers of stacked garments. Covered in this way, the figure seems to consist only of legs and a shapeless form. A pink, floral terrycloth velvet forms its outer skin, initially giving the impression of a cozy, perhaps snack-craving “femininity” that enjoys surrounding itself with soft pillows and stuffed animals. However, this innocent, naive image is violently torn apart by the artist’s interventions. The pink flower pattern is ripped open in several places through deep, at times brutally aggressive, cuts that expose the body’s interior. From these gaping “wounds,” multi-layered red fabrics emerge, taking on an increasingly darker red hue at the place where the heart would be. The head remains hidden under the fabric mass. The legs, however, are the most elaborately differentiated, down to the toes, which become visible through a hole in the tights on the left leg.

Birgit Dieker finds her material in second-hand shops and plays with the associative character of these clothes—as protection or even as masquerade, but always imbued with the history of those who once wore them. “It symbolizes the tension between the inside and outside, between the private and public, covering and revealing,” says the artist, emphasizing what is hidden within, what does not reach the outside through a “whole” body image—the emotional wounds, phobias, and contradictions. Thus, the artist uses second-hand clothes as a medium that could not be more intimate. Traces of lived lives are embedded in these fabrics: in direct contact with the skin, body odors, perfumes, or even sweat remain, signs of the body—love and fear, effort and joy.

With Anita (2011), Birgit Dieker created another sculpture where this associative force is particularly evident. It is inspired by the legendary Berlin dancer Anita Berber. In the 1920s, she embodied the female seductress, a public figure, celebrated singer, and femme fatale, whose scandals and drug abuse led to an early death. Dieker is interested in the discrepancy between public glamour and private failure—a deep inner turmoil that is played out on her body.

In an elegant, self-assured pose, dressed in a cocoon of golden sequins, she presents her body on a bar stool, her arms crossed behind her head, her gaze turned sideways, coquettishly directed at the viewer. However, Anita, too, has endured deep injuries in her creation; she is marked by life and simultaneously made up for a life as a glamour girl: her body consists of countless layers of Lurex dresses, whose shine grows duller and darker the closer they get to the core. Her metallic, shiny sequin dress functions like armor and has been literally cut into her body, so that parts of her form have been shaved off, opened, or removed. The remaining limbs appear like withered black insect legs—a metamorphosis in which the injured caterpillar body simultaneously reveals a female figure: “A shimmering body, head and neck like in a cocoon, with almost a wing on her back: with these thin, hairy legs, presented on the stool, she resembles a pierced insect,” says the artist.

Dieker’s sculptures are closely connected to the tendencies of Abject Art, a term introduced in the 1980s to describe art that deals with the body in its deep psychological and social dimensions. Sculptural works by artists like Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Mike Kelley, Robert Gober, and David Hammons share a materiality considered inferior or base: fabric, latex, rubber, hair, and wax. By directly referencing body functions and traces of the body, they are closely tied to societal taboos and traumas, personal obsessions, and phobias, which constantly undermine our notions of a stable body-ego.

In her equally “hairy” floor sculpture Der innere Schweinehund (2005), which we encounter on the gallery balcony above, the artist brings the discarded, both thematically and formally, into alignment. With this sculpture, she gets right up close to us and touches our deepest fears and sensations.

Der innere Schweinehund seems uncanny, foreign, and repulsive as it lies on the ground. A large body, shaggy and brown, helpless like a hunted animal. Upon closer inspection, we recognize that it represents internal organs, but not in a fleshy, visceral way—instead, with a felt-like, hairy surface. It is an enlarged reproduction of body parts from within a human that no longer reveal anything about its identity. The organs have been freed from their protective shell, the skin, and now lie open and unprotected before us: lungs, heart, stomach, intestines, nerve strands, esophagus, and brain. The fact that these are recreated from dry human and animal hair increases the disorientation and estrangement that the artist has already embedded in the sculpture by significantly enlarging its scale. At the same time, by using coarse, dry material (hair) to represent soft, organic shapes (internal organs), she intensifies the abject nature of the piece. That is, we are repelled and attracted at the same time, not least because of the psychological effect the object produces upon viewing. The “inner pig-dog” is a term that commonly refers to what drives our desires and comforts. Dieker, however, transforms this expression of personal weakness into an image that makes us painfully and unapologetically aware of our own physicality and thus our frailty. The exposed internal organs point to death, their visibility only existing in the moment of death.

The exhibition title itself offers a crucial clue to this connection. With The Big Striptease, Dieker references a passage from Lady Lazarus, a poem by American poet Sylvia Plath. In it, the speaker describes their body in the moment of their self-chosen death. However, the suicide attempt fails. Their salvation becomes a public spectacle, their suicide an act of performance—art. Lady Lazarus, the one resurrected from death, the saved one, speaks of her body as if it were a foreign object: “A walking miracle, so to speak, / My right foot / A paperweight, / My face, expressionless / Fine Jewish linen.”

Her body possesses a materiality that is layered and can be peeled away, much like Dieker’s fabric sculptures: “Peel me from this handkerchief / Oh enemy / […] How many millions of fluff. / Peanut-munching masses / Push in, want to watch, / How they unpack me, strip me naked. / To the great striptease.” What emerges beneath is a self that is constantly changing and cannot be grasped. This multi-layered and transformable nature—the realization that it is impossible to experience the body as one, as whole—is at the heart of Birgit Dieker’s art.

[1] Birgit Dieker in conversation with the curator on June 26, 2012.

[2] Quoted in: Moritz Woelk, “Birgit Dieker,” in Selected Artists – Recipients of the Visual Arts Fellowship from the Berlin Senate 2008, Berlin 2009.

[3] “The Berber was a magnet for scandals; she took morphine and cocaine, drank a bottle of cognac a day, and fought with anyone who crossed her path. (…) Her often nude dances, with titles such as Cocaine or Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy, frequently led to tumultuous scenes during performances. Soon, she was famous and equally scandalized and notorious.” Quoted in: Ricarda D. Herbrand, Goddess and Idol: Anita Berber and Marlene Dietrich, 2003.

[4] Birgit Dieker in conversation with the author on June 26, 2012.

[5] “Dying is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” Cf. Plath, 2008 (as in note 1), p. 43.

[6] Cf. Plath, 2008, p. 41.

Curated by: Dr. Andrea Jahn