DUSSELDORF.- The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is honoring the internationally acclaimed photographic pioneer and critical voice Katharina Sieverding (b. 1941 in Prague) with a major retrospective. The award-winning artist, who lives in Düsseldorf, became known for her iconic close-ups of her own face and her large-scale photographs, which she was one of the first to introduce to the art world in the mid-1970s. Her monumental works, which can be categorized as performance, body art, and experimental film, have added a new dimension to photography.

In her work, she addresses themes that, while highly topical, can be read as timeless. Her work is always an exploration of important issues such as ethical and political responsibility in the face of numerous global crises.

To this day, Katharina Sieverding takes a political stance with her art: on National Socialism and the question of German identity against the backdrop of anti-democratic forces, as well as on global issues by repeatedly focusing on the causes and consequences of wars and their complex constellations of power and violence, and linked to this, on mankind’s destructive exploitation of planet Earth.

On view on the lower level of K21 is an impressive survey of Katharina Sieverding’s oeuvre, which is characterized by the innovative and aesthetic virtuosity of her photographs. In addition to key works from her sixty-year career, an insight into her extensive archive as an open space for thought and discourse is being presented for the first time at the center of an exhibition.

The Nucleus of Her Self-Portraits

Katharina Sieverding has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Goslar Kaiserring in 2004 and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2017. A multiple documenta participant, she achieved international renown with her iconic close-ups of her own face, which she has produced in series since 1969, as well as her large-scale photographs, which she introduced to art in 1975. Together with Klaus Mettig, she experimentally subjected her photographs to numerous processes of transformation, working with multiple exposures, superimpositions, reflections, filters, and solarization.

The Polaroids from 1969, grouped in multi-part tableaus and serving as the “prototypes” on which most of her large-scale self-portraits are based, are being shown for the first time in this exhibition in Düsseldorf. Through the unique core of her Polaroids, it is possible to trace not only the starting point, but also the working method and development process of her iconic self-portraits.

Her work also shows traces of her earlier medical studies and her time in the theater, where Sieverding also designed stage sets. She records, dissects, and diagnoses historical themes and social wounds, blurs gender boundaries, and uses her work to question the power and abuse of images. In addition to processed photographs and slide projections, her oeuvre encompasses performative works, installations, films, videos, and poster cam- paigns.

After a series of works dealing with the domestic political situation in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as GROSSFOTO XI/78 with the text “Schlachtfeld Deutschland” (Battlefield Germany) from 1978, which deals with the fight against the radical leftist terrorists of the Red Army Faction (RAF), the work Deutschland wird deutscher (Germany Is Becoming More German) was created in 1992. The work was originally intended to be shown in and around Stuttgart but met with strong resistance and rejection from politicians. Eventually, the work was shown on over 500 billboards in public spaces in Berlin. The work was Katharina Sieverding’s response to the then recent founding of the European Union, the reunification of East and West Germany, and the associated resurgence of nationalism, which is more topical today than ever.

A Student of Joseph Beuys
Katharina Sieverding’s work always emphasizes the social responsibility of the artist and expresses it through the radical use of her own person. She shares with her former teacher Joseph Beuys the conviction that art can initiate processes of change, and his Social Sculpture remains a point of reference in her artistic work to this day.

This is also the case with the over 12 x 19-meter large image of her work Kontinentalkern I XXIV/83 (Continental Core, 1983), which hovers in its ominous topicality on the cube above the piazza of K21. It depicts the United States Army Air Forces bomber “Enola Gay,” which dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, with the text “Die letzten Knöpfe sind gedrückt” (The last buttons have been pressed). At the same time, the work in the plenary hall of the former state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia marks the place where West German politics were made, and democratic processes were negotiated for decades.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Wienand Verlag and edited by Susanne Gaensheimer and Isabelle Malz (232 pages in German and English, approx. 220 illustrations, museum edition approx. 34 euros) with contributions by Isabelle Malz, Ulrike Matzer, and Victor Zaiden, and a conversation between Filipa César and Sylvia Schedel- bauer.

“With Katharina Sieverding, K21 is paying tribute to one of the great and formative figures of the internationally renowned art scene in the Rhineland. For more than five decades, she has been testing and expanding the manifold possibilities of expression of the medium of photography, both in terms of content and form. Her social and socio-political themes, such as the coming to terms with the Nazi past, the nuclear threat during the Cold War, or the exploration of gender and race, are of unbroken, sometimes frightening topicality. Making this critical and powerful artistic voice visible and audible by supporting the major exhibition project at K21 is one of the core concerns of the cultural promotion of the Rhineland Re- gional Council (RRC).” Dr. Corinna Franz, RRC Head of Culture and Regional Cultural Preservation

Curator: Isabelle Malz