Katharina Sieverding

A photographer known best for self-portraiture, Katharina Sieverding’s work is a long-term study of her own identity. Using various techniques to abstract her own image, Sieverding’s work comes out of the post-war German avant-garde. At the Kunstakademie she studied under Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys and alongside Blinky Palermo. Consequently, Sieverding’s photographs bear the confrontational disposition and interest in post-Pop figuration that marked that era. Her portraits often use high contrast, false color, or solarization. Perhaps best known among these are Sieverding’s collaborations with her longtime partner, Klaus Mettig, the Motokamera series, which confronts the viewer with androgynous images of the couple, and their penetrating, outward gaze.

Although Sieverding is well known in Germany, having received commissions from the German government and several high-profile exhibitions, she was less visible in the United States before 2004, when she was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York