The Lady is a Transformer:
Artist Photographer
Katharina Sieverding Receives the Goslarer Kaiserring 2004
Katharina Sieverding, Transformer, 1972,
Deutsche Bank Collection, (c) VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Transformer
is the title of a photographic work made in 1973 by
Katharina Sieverding. The five-part series shows the heavily made-up,
androgynous visage of the artist as it changes from exposure to exposure;
each minimal alteration in pose, lighting, and contrast reveals a new
personality facet. Sieverding's series oscillates in the field of tension
between query and assertion, metaphor and likeness. Her pictures become
role images in which she uses her own mutable personality to convey social
change - and reflect the glamour, fashion, consumerist cult,
gender-specific behavioral roles, and mass media images prevailing today.
The title of the series seems almost programmatic for the artist's work,
who was born in Prague in 1944; her works on the themes of identity, the
individual and society, and the technological transformation of humans and
nature have made her into one of the most important German artists for
over 30 years.
Katharina Sieverding, Manton, 1997,
Deutsche Bank Collection, (c) VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Now, with the
presentation of the Goslarer
Kaiserring in the
Mönchehaus Museum for Modern Art on October 9 2004, Katharina
Sieverding will be awarded one of the most renowned international art
prizes of the day. The city of Goslar has been awarding the aquamarine set
in gold with the engraved seal of Heinrich IV annually since 1975. The
honorary award pays tribute to the oeuvre of a contemporary international
artist who has provided present-day art with "significant impulses,"
according to the text of the award certificate. The list of renowned
artists that have received the ring speaks for itself: from the first
award winner Henry Moore
(1975) to Willem
de Kooning,
Joseph Beuys,
Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman,
Sigmar Polke,
Jenny Holzer, and
William Kentridge, the list of ring bearers reads like a "Who's Who" of
contemporary art.
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Katharina Sieverding, Untitled, 1998,
Deutsche Bank Collection, (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
With her portraits and images of bodies, the artist has made a considerable
contribution to the further development of photography, as the jury
stated. Sieverding was, in fact, one of the first women to assert herself
in the West German art establishment and has been enjoying international
success with her work since the early seventies. Influenced by the
feminist discourses of the day, and having studied under Joseph Beuys, she
began investigating constellations of feminine identity in the early
seventies, incorporating found material such as newspaper clippings and
film stills into her work. As a synthesis between photo-technical
experiment and self-reflective involvement with her own physiognomy, her
monumental wall panels combined influences from performance art with
media-critical approaches. During the eighties, her images increasingly
drew attention to a general political precariousness and danger, although
it was the atmospheric content and the undefined nature of media images
that were placed in the foreground. Examples of this are the 1993 work
Deutschland wird deutscher (Germany is Becoming More German), a
billboard piece installed in Berlin's subway stations and other public
areas in response to violent incidents perpetrated by the radical right
following the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Bombensicher Bundeskunsthalle
Bonn die letzten Knöpfe sind gedrückt from 1983 (
Bombproof Bundeskunsthalle Bonn the Last Buttons are Pressed), which
addressed the threat of atomic weapons.
Katharina Sieverding,
Bombensicher
Bundeskunsthalle Bonn die letzten Knöpfe sind gedrückt, 1983,
Deutsche Bank Collection, (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
In 1997, Deutsche Bank voted Katharina Sieverding as their "Artist of the
Fiscal Year" and organized numerous exhibitions of her works from the
collection in branches, Kunstvereinen, and museums, culminating in the
1998 exhibition at the
Deutsche Guggenheim,
Works on Pigment. Along with international shows and participation in
several documenta exhibitions, Sieverding showed together with
Gerhard Merz in the
German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1997. She has been a
professor at Berlin's University of Art (
UDK)since 1992. Currently, her works can be seen in the group exhibition
The Future Has a Silver Lining. Genealogies of Glamour at the Migros
Museum in Zurich. On October 24 2004, Close Up, a one-person
exhibition of the artist's work, will be opening in
P.S.1 in New York.
Translation: Andrea Scrima
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