Katja Seib
Working directly on canvases of raw hessian fabric, Katja Seib produces paintings that riff on photographs taken with her phone. Her quiet interiors and mundane domestic scenes offer a look into the human psyche through layered and surreal storytelling. Through subtle interplays of texture and image, deft brushwork, and meticulous attention to detail, Seib creates works that are at once familiar and strange. Her compositions feature bizarre scenarios, dreamlike visuals, allegorical symbols, and figures holding enigmatic gazes. She draws on the constant and ongoing stream of images that form in her mind—and on her phone—making each painting function as an entry in an intimate visual diary.
In her paintings produced for Made in L.A. 2020, Seib weaves together scenes from her daily life with allegory. Her figures, which the artist calls protagonists, are magicians, conjuring spells, disappearing acts, and hallucinations with the help of their animal shamans. Seib draws a line between reality and dream state.
In Made in L.A. 2020: a version, the artist’s work is present in two institutions, across Los Angeles. See Katja Seib's work on view at The Huntington.
-
![A woman behind a vase of flowers reaches out toward a black snake]()
Katja Seib, Temptation, 2020Oil on two different canvas types. Overall: 63 × 115 in. (160 × 292.1 cm), left: 63 × 71 in. (160 × 180.3 cm), right: 63 × 44 in. (160 × 111.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. -
![A black and white painting of a man dressed in white leaving a dark room through a white door]()
Katja Seib, Bang bang (he shot me down), 2020Oil on two different canvas types. Two panels, 80 x 60 in. (203.2 x 152.4 cm) left, 80 x 40 in. (203.2 x 101.6 cm) right, 80 x 100 in. (203.2 x 254 cm) overall. © Katja Seib. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Elon Schoenholz -
Katja Seib, Mona Lisa's Smile (left), 2020; Bang bang (he shot me down) (right), 2020. Installation view, Hammer MuseumInstallation view, Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
BIOGRAPHY
Katja Seib was born in 1989 in Düsseldorf, Germany. She studied painting at Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, graduating with an MFA in 2016. Painting directly on canvases of raw hessian fabric, she riffs on photographs from her phone, balancing the traditional medium with technology-mediated imagery. Seib is fascinated by surface pattern and texture, as well as by the histories of her medium, and through a combination of a subtle interplay of texture and image, deft brushwork, and a meticulous attention to detail, she creates works that are at once familiar and strange. Working figuratively, she often includes herself or her friends within her depictions of the everyday, grounding the paintings almost uncannily in reality. Surreal motifs and darkness variously act as catalysts for fiction: bizarre scenarios, dreamlike visuals, allegorical symbols, and enigmatic gazes populate her canvases. Seib draws on the constant and ongoing stream of images that form in her mind—and on her phone, which make the individual paintings function like entries in an intimate visual diary. Her work has been exhibited at Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2019), and Sadie Coles HQ, London (2018).
