A German artist born in Prague in 1944, Katharina Sieverding studied at the School of Art in Hamburg (1962–63), then under Joseph Beuys at the Academy in Düsseldorf (1967–72). She began producing very large photos which made play with blow-ups, contrasts and grid overlays, looking into the problem of identity via multiplication of images and of her own face in lightly reworked self-portraits. In the series Transformer (1973–74) she blurs the gender borders with photographs of herself and her husband Klaus Mettig heavily made-up, with their hybrid faces calling into question the objectivity of our way of seeing. ‘The conquest of another gender takes place in each of us,’ she has said, deliberately aligning herself with a made-up Warhol in her Selfportraits in Drag, with the Bowie of the Ziggy Stardust period, with Jack Smith—a close friend—and with Lou Reed, all of whom made make-up an artifice essential to the definition of a camp aesthetics. This multiple photographic uvre featured in the iconic exhibition Transformer: Aspekte der Travestie, organised in 1974 by Swiss curator Jean-Christophe Ammann; the exhibition looked into the connection between cross-dressing in popular music and Contemporary Art, approaching the phenomenon as at once creative and critical of reductive bourgeois visions of masculinity. The ‘outraging’ of traditional masculinity by Little Richard and the stars of Glam Rock and punk was presented in parallel with the work of artists like Jürgen Klauke, Urs Lüthi and Sieverding herself. Borrowed from the famous Lou Reed album, the English word ‘transformer’ came to be used by these young Swiss and German artists to describe the transcending of binary gender definitions; and more than ever before photography became a mirror enabling play with duality and otherness.
