Annegret Soltau is one of the most important feminist artists of our time. Since the 1970s, she has been exploring questions of personal and social identity, reflecting on her position as a woman within the construct of her own family. From January 18 to June 7, 2026, the Kunstforum at TU Darmstadt will be showing the exhibition Annegret Soltau VATERSUCHE (Search for Father).
Like a seemingly endless drawer of a filing cabinet, the 69 sheets of the work “Vatersuche” extend into the room. The series summarizes the story of Annegret Soltau's search for her father, whom she never knew. Although it was never discussed in the family, the question of her father's identity has always preoccupied her. She therefore began collecting information about him at an early age. Her mother only gave her a name and a single photo of him. In 1988, Soltau contacted an official search agency for the first time. Since then, she has repeatedly made various attempts to find out more about her father. In view of the countless sobering replies, she decided in 2003 to transform the collected material into an artistic work, which she continues to this day. To this end, Soltau uses various self-portraits, from which she tears out her face and sews the collected documents onto the cut-out area with needle and thread.
Unlike many female artists of her generation, for whom their own fathers embodied violent patriarchy, for Annegret Soltau the father figure always remained a projection whose absence she felt as a great loss.
The exhibition juxtaposes the series “Tagesdiagramme” (Daily Diagrams) — 58 individual sheets that the artist kept over a period of twelve months in 1977 as a visual diary using felt-tip pens, watercolor techniques, and a typewriter on simple DIN A4 sheets. Precisely because the Tagesdiagramme show no direct physicality, they are among the artist's most intimate works. In contrast to the works that Soltau intended for public viewing, they allow a glimpse behind the façade of the complex system that is Annegret Soltau.
In them, the artist sketches her own emotional states and conditions, but also her relationships with other people, very openly. In doing so, she attempts to get to the bottom of the connections and causalities and to classify her contradictory feelings. To this end, the artist often breaks words down into their individual parts, for example the word “Auseinandersetzung” (confrontation).
With her daily diagrams, Soltau attempts a daily phenomenological self-analysis. Starting from herself and her own perception, she approaches knowledge in the sense of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Soltau achieves the physical dimension, which derives from the rejection of the idea of the separation of body and mind, in her daily diagrams through the interplay of gray typewriter font and colored sections. Soltau contrasts the concrete imagery of the typewriter font with a color-emphasized, often abstract image level. The small drawings, colored lines, and watercolor surfaces contrast with the typed words and capture the human being in all its physical and sensual dimensions.
The daily diagrams were created at the same time as the “Schwanger” (Pregnant) series of works and initially address the desire to have children, later accompanying the pregnancy itself. Annegret Soltau was one of the first female artists of the 20th century to make pregnancy a central theme in her work—also with the political intention of proving that a woman can be both an artist and a mother. Today, she is celebrated for her work as a pioneer of the feminist avant-garde.
Both series invite visitors to explore them page by page—like an artist's book protruding into the room.
