Shatter and Shelter

2026

 

In Shatter and Shelter, Birgit Dieker brings together two opposing movements: shattering and sheltering, injury and protection, exposure and withdrawal. These are poles that run throughout her sculptural practice. For many years, Dieker has approached the human body not as a closed, immutable form, but as something vulnerable and mutable—shaped by experiences, memories, emotions, and social inscriptions.

The female body plays a particular role in this exploration. Dieker examines images and ideas of femininity that move between desire and manipulation, care and violence, self-assertion and vulnerability. In her work, bodies never appear detached from the social roles and expectations inscribed upon them. What particularly interests the artist is precisely this ambiguity: the simultaneous presence of attraction and repulsion, beauty and unease, the need for protection and the impulse to resist.

Clothing occupies a central place in Dieker’s work. Worn, used, and intimately connected to the body, it is far more than mere material for the artist. It is a covering and a second skin, a repository of individuality and, at the same time, an expression of social roles. In elaborate working processes, Dieker layers and stitches fabrics into compact sculptural bodies, only to open them up again, cut into them, or expose parts of their inner structure. From this soft and familiar material emerge bodies, heads, and organic forms that are both alluring and unsettling.

In Shatter and Shelter, clothing enters into dialogue with other materials and objects that already carry meanings of their own: porcelain cups, potholders, hair, mannequin heads, bitumen, and roofing felt. The domestic and the fragile encounter materials associated with building, sealing, and protection; idealized images of the female body meet injury and fragmentation. Dieker removes these objects from their familiar uses and transforms them into elements of a distinctive corporeal visual language. The familiar tips into the uncanny; the domestic can become threatening, while the fragile can become resistant.

This ambiguity is brought to a particular intensity in the new work Smokey Eyes. Broken female mannequin heads with made-up eyes, eyelashes, and red lips come together to form an explosive device—the former ideals of female beauty become warheads. Seduction and threat, glamour and violence are brought into unsettling proximity.

The exhibition title Shatter and Shelter extends this ambiguity beyond the individual body. Protection is never absolute. Coverings can shelter and constrain, preserve and conceal; relationships and our ideas of ourselves, too, can become fragile and fracture. Dieker’s sculptures do not resolve these contradictions. They give them physical form.

Birgit Dieker’s sculptural work has been presented in numerous institutional exhibitions since the late 1990s. Her work has been shown at institutions including Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the Bundeswehr Museum of Military History Dresden, and Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, which dedicated a solo exhibition to her work in 2023. Dieker’s works are held in collections including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Sculpture Collection of the Dresden State Art Collections. Her work is also currently on view in Kunstkammer Gegenwart III at Dresden’s Royal Palace.

Dieker has a long exhibition history with Laden für Nichts: following Überwintern in 2014 and All My Pretty Ones in 2019, she now returns with Shatter and Shelter.