Katharina Sieverding and Paolo Canevari

The groundbreaking photographer and filmmaker Katharina Sieverding lands in New York for her first U.S. retrospective at P.S.1, only to have host Michael Rush provoke an illuminating conversation further enriched by the Italian-born New York artist, Paolo Canevari.

Katharina Sieverding's stunning series of large-scale self-portraits from the last three decades are currently on view, through January 23, 2005 at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in "Katharina Sieverding: Close-Up", the first comprehensive survey in the U.S. of photographic work by this influential European artist. Ageless, anti-Fascist, feminist, cinematic and ultimately subjective, the work is both distorting and broadly transformative, as host Michael Rush learns in the conversation he leads here.

An educator as well as an artist, Sieverding teaches at universities in Berlin and in Shanghai, China, and has exhibited at museums and art centers the world over, including the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Stadlische Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, where she lives, the Guggenheim Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Modern Art, The Goethe Institute in Budapest. She is represented by Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin, Galerie Michel Neff in Frankfurt, Galerie Grimm/Rosenfeld in Munich, among others. In October, 2004, she received the Goslarer Kaiserring, Germany's most prestigious award to an artist.

Paolo Canevari's barbed-wire and rubber courtyard installation at P.S.1, "Welcome to Oz," makes reference to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but relates even more to the fences that societies sometimes erect around the creative process to restrict the free flow of movement and thought. His work has also been exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Palazzo della Esposozioni in Rome, Centre for Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and at the Liverpool Biennial, 2004.

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