Annegret Soltau VATERSUCHE

January 18 to June 1, 2026

Annegret Soltau is one of the most important feminist artists of our time. Since the 1970s, she has been focusing on personal and social identity, while also reflecting on her place as a woman in the construct of her own family. From January 18 to June 1, 2026, the Kunstforum der TU Darmstadt is showing the exhibition Annegret Soltau VATERSUCHE.

Especially her pictures of bodies consisting of parts sewn-together are examples of her thematic focus on the wounds and the healing she has experienced in her past. Furthermore, she has created pieces that have always been provocative and were ahead of her time in terms of social issues. Whether in her explicit series about pregnancy and birth, in her involving her pubescent daughter in her work projects, or in her body-sewing works that deliberately go beyond the question of clear gender identity, Soltau has anticipated many discussions in society and has always positioned her controversial art off the mainstream track.

»My artistic work is based on documents from my many years of unsuccessfully searching for my lost father. The work currently consist of 69 self - portraits. I sewed the original letters from agencies like the Red Cross, the German War Graves Commission, and the German Agency for the Notification of the Next of Kin of Fallen Members of the German Wehrmacht to my [photographed] face. This means that, in my self - portraits, the unsolved mystery of my father resulting from Second World War is liter ally written on my face, and these formal responses stay on my face like an empty space, like a blank spot.«

Annegret Soltau

Annegret Soltau was born on January 16, 1946, in Lüneburg out of wedlock, shortly after the end of World War II. Although she was delivered in a hospital, her mother described the circumstances of her birth as difficult. She was unable to give her child the attention she needed. Soltau was raised mainly by her grandmother in the Elbmarsch region near Hamburg. In her teenage years, her relationship to her mother was still problematic, and her biological father was never mentioned. The artist, who has been living in Darmstadt since 1973, has thus been absorbed by the search for her father and the story of her parents for a very long time. Her first letter to the German Red Cross’s (GRC) Tracking Service was written in 1988. This was followed by more search requests, which she sent to a wide variety of agencies. In 2003, the artist decided to transform the material she had assembled into a work of art.

In cooperation with
Museum Goch
Galerie Anita Beckers