Katharina Sieverding

Katharina Sieverding (born 1944) is a photographer known for her self-portraiture. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. She is a professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin.

Sieverding was born in Prague. She began studying art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1964. There she started studying stage design alongside Georg Klusemann and Jörg Immendorff under Teo Otto, but later joined the sculpture class taught by Joseph Beuys in 1967. Her fellow students included Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel. Between 1971 and 1974, she was part of the film class at the Kunstakademie. In 1976, she took part in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sieverding's works consist of self-portraiture and most have an abstract quality. She uses the techniques of silhouette, contrast, and extreme close-up to make the photograph more revealing of herself. She tinted all the prints in one 1969 series a deep scarlet, and for another painted her face gold. Her work often makes statements about society and the individual, such as showing the familiarity of the self and the distance of others. Often she puts multiple portraits together in one piece. Each portrait fills the frame in a way to show the presence of self.

Maton (1969-1972), one of the first photographic series, comprises composite portraits of the artist staged in a photo booth. These portraits resurface in a series of 16 larger-than-life photographs of Sieverding in Stauffenberg-Block, from 1969, the title of which refers to German officer Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who made a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Viewed in sequence, the expressions of the faces remain fixed—mouth closed, unsmiling, eyes tilted slightly upward. Experimenting with the medium, Sieverding solarized the silver gelatin originals and then used a red filter to tint the images. In the 56-part series Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen (To Look at the Sun at Midnight) (1973) shows individual portraits of the artist's face painted in shimmering gold dust. Another work, Motorkamera (1973/1974) consists of 336 individual black and white portraits of Sieverding and her partner Klaus Mettig engaged in a series of intimate postures. This is the departure point for another seminal series from this period, Transformer (1973), which features large format projections of multi-layered androgynous portraits. A later large-scale multi-media installation, Untitled (Ultramarine) (1993), is a series of eight self-portraits, each having three parts, united by a vertical band of electric blue pigment.

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