PHOTO:Katharina Sieverding

The Czech-born, German artist Katharina Sieverding is one of the most significant artists working today. With over six decades of highly influential artistic practice spanning photography, film, and installation. Trained as a stage designer, it did not take her long to cast off any inhibitions about large scale images. As a student of Joseph Beuys, she focused her artistic energy on political issues. And as a photographer, she tested the boundaries of the medium’s manifold technical possibilities.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum Frieder Burda Archive

Katharina Sieverding became known for the unprecedented consistency with which she has used her portrait, enlarging and manipulating it in a variety of ways, in film and photography since the 1960s.  Beginning in the 1970s she worked on large-format montages on the state of the world, first shown internationally at documenta 6 in 1977. She critically questions the accelerated imaging processes of the present in the sense of responsibility also toward oneself. Her best-known works include “Schlachtfeld Deutschland” (1978_, a statement on the time of the Red Army Faction, and the 1993 Berlin poster campaign “Deutschland wird deutscher”, in which Sieverding reacted to the radical right-wing attacks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Shortly before this, the artist realized the Memorial to the Murdered Members of the Reichstag. Two exhibitions devoted to Katharina Sieverding presents the Museum Frieder Burda. “Watching the Sun at Midnight” at the Museum Frieder Burda and “Headlines” at the museum’s Berlin exhibition space Salon Berlin.  The exhibitions bring together works spanning all phases of Sieverding’s pioneering and widely appreciated 60-year oeuvre. The exhibitions  include videos from the late 1960s as well as her oversized self-portrait series from the 1970s to the 1990s, right up to her contemporary productions. “Watching the Sun at Midnight” pays homage to Sieverding’s persistent treatment of contemporary German and global matters, one that has ensured the ongoing relevance of her work over the past 60 years. It is an extensive solo presentation of Czech-born German artist Katharina Sieverding’s work, covering all phases of her oeuvre from her videos of the late 1960s to her oversized self-portrait series of the 1970s and up to her contemporary productions, with new works including “Gefechtspause” which addresses the lockdown during the COVID-19 crisis. A student of Joseph Beuys, Sieverding has continuously focused her artistic energy on political issues. Considered a pioneer of photography internationally, testing the boundaries of the medium’s manifold technical possibilities, she is known for her unconventional visual strategies and media-led creative practice. She has re-vitalized the artistic potential of photography, introducing the super-sized format as a key element of her exhibitions, at a time when the practice was seldom utilized. In her serial photographic works, she gives expression to reflections about identity, the current social, political, and cultural climate, gender discourses, and the necessary emancipation of the female artist. Mirroring her themes and subjective perception of current events, her works convey an image of the time.  From the microscopic to the macroscopic, the references in her oeuvre are complex. Her father’s clinically dissecting view sharpened her own focus and opened it to the technical opportunities presented by her chosen medium. From her origins in theater, Sieverding understood how images on a wall can define an entire room, with the same immediate and all-consuming effect of a stage backdrop or a big screen in a cinema – which in turn unlock the imagination for an introspective look at fantasy worlds. Her pictures, often in black-and-white with a bright red signal color and accompanied by striking slogans, reflect media-based and commercial manipulation strategies, questioning them at the same time: it is no coincidence that the artist has repeatedly and consciously escaped the museum setting and sought direct contact with the broader public in common urban spaces. Her earlier, highly self-reflective role in the Düsseldorf art scene, which came across mainly as a men’s club, raised her awareness of the question of one’s own individuality and identity, gender, history and its conditions – and the fluid borders and process-like transformations between these categories. “Headlines” is a thematically focused selection of large-scale photographs referring to the darkest chapter in Germany’s history. The selection brings together large-format photographic works by the artist that turn to the darkest part of German history: that of National Socialism. Through these photographs, which build on documents from the concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, as well as records held at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Sieverding points to the widely diverse manifestations and expressions of anti-Semitism and exclusion, racism, and violence, outlining the latter’s timelessness and societies’ inability to surmount them as they recur throughout history.

Photo: Katharina Sieverding, THE GREAT WHITE WAY GOES BLACK, IX / 1977 Color photography, acrylic, steel frame 300 x 500 cm Installation view of the exhibition: Katharina Sieverding – Close Up, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, 2005 © Katharina Sieverding, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021

Info: Curators: Udo Kittelmann and Katharina Sieverding, Museum Frieder Burda, Lichtentaler Allee 8B, Baden-Baden, Germany, Duration: 28/8/2021-9/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00 and Salon Berlin-Museum Frieder Burda, Auguststraße 11 – 13, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 3-26/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 15:00-18:00 Fri-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.museum-frieder-burda.de