Yellow houses: Erika Stürmer-Alex' travels

Erika Stürmer-Alex (*1938) studied painting, graphic art and art in architecture at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art. From the 1960s onwards, she undertook various study trips, initially to other socialist countries such as Poland, Romania and Hungary, and later also to France and Italy. Travel was an important tool for her to broaden her artistic horizons and, by experiencing new colors, landscapes and folk art styles, to perceive her home environment in the GDR differently. The yellow house on her artist's farm in Lietzen, which was inspired by a trip to Hungary, still bears witness to this today. The “trips to the West” to Paris and Venice, among other places, were also absolutely necessary for Stürmer-Alex to be able to see well-known works of art history and architecture in the original. In the video interview, the artist talks about how travelling influenced her work and reads a passage from a diary she kept during a trip to Moscow and the former Leningrad in the mid-1960s.

The interview was conducted as part of the research project "Affective Archives – Artists' Travels Abroad during the GDR"