katharina sieverding :: hybrid image surfaces

Transformer (1973); film stills from projection, dimensions variable
Image © Klaus Mettig, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Berlin; © Katharina Sieverding VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Berlin

Weltlinie (1999), A / D / A Process, Acrylic, Steel; 190 x 125 cm
Image © Katharina Sieverding, Courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Köln

Encode 14 (2006), A/D/A Process, Acrylic, Steel; 275 x 375 cm
Image © Katharina Sieverding, Courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Köln

Katharina Sieverding characterizes her works as “hybrid image surfaces and spaces on the border of truth and fiction, iconoclasm and the pictorial turn.” Sieverding’s work was almost from the very beginning virtually antipodal to the traditional definition of photography. In the process of creating her often monumental images, the artist took paths that were radical in technical, thematic, and formal terms, using a variety of techniques of reproduction and a large reservoir of images that the artist found or generated herself. She already developed her significant style in the late 1960s as a student of Joseph Beuys, when she began working with photographic techniques. Over the course of 40 years, Sieverding’s work, with its central basic issue of “identity as individuality and collective individual,” has unarguably always taken pioneering positions and exerted a great deal of influence on contemporary photographic art, anticipating and bringing about many developments. (edit from re-title)

Katharina Sieverding’s „exhibition Projected Data Images (2010) was recently organized at I.M.A.I. (Inter Media Art Institute) in Düsseldorf as a part of the Quadriennale 2010.