Katja Seib, a transplant from Düsseldorf to Los Angeles, combines the tradition of ugly German painting with LA glamour. In a style that seesaws between sour and sweet, she mashes up beauty with its opposite—or, perhaps, its underbelly—when painting people.Seib paints mostly young women, strong and pretty ones, combining motifs from European art history with pictures from her phone. Cornucopia (2025), currently on view in the SITE Santa Fe International, has a Caravaggesque composition depicting two women who hold playing cards and tarot cards, and it features a classic mise en abyme. Still, the canvas feels utterly contemporary; one woman’s sinuous, unanatomical arms are painted with evident looseness and freedom.But it is Seib’s palette that is most unsettling. She does not mix colors. Instead, to build form, she will layer several adjacent hues straight from the tube. This is easiest to see when she renders skin, which in Seib’s hands can appear mildly flat—a surface but also a shape—as in the pink-faced Sicilian Defence (2021) or the blue-faced Medusa in vain (2020). The resulting colors are so pure as to appear, ironically, unnatural.Katja Seib: Medusa in vain, 2020.Photo Elon Schoenholz/Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London/©Katja SeibBorn in Düsseldorf in 1989, Seib was immersed in art practically from birth. The city’s rich art history is felt nearly everywhere: “Even the bakery lady knows who Joseph Beuys is,” the artist told me. Seib started attending student art shows at the city’s famed Kunstakademie before she even turned 10. When we spoke in Santa Fe, she described early—and enviable—impressions that works by Jörg Immendorff and his students left on her. As soon as she was old enough, she enrolled in the academy for both her BFA and MFA, and took courses with Peter Doig that were especially formative. But the weight of Düsseldorf’s traditions also meant that the art world there remained very male dominated. Seib felt she had to be “not only twice as good, but three times better than the male painters.”This motivated her to continually outdo herself, and soon enough, she found some key women supporters. Doig’s wife, Parinaz Mogadassi, showed Seib’s work at a project space in London right as she was finishing her MFA in 2016. There, it caught the eye of Sadie Coles, a prestigious London gallerist with whom Seib has been showing ever since. Her paintings have gotten bigger over time as she’s gotten “more and more comfortable with my work.”Straight out of school, Seib started showing all over—in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Notably, she featured in the 2020 edition of “Made in L.A.” and in 2023 received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera. These changing settings have had evident impact on her work. The titular object in Cornucopia references a symbol seen in Renaissance paintings but, as it was made specifically for Santa Fe, also evokes early Thanksgivings and colonization. When she moved to the fabric district in LA, bold, rich patterns found their way into her work. And for a recent show in Newport, Rhode Island, she took to painting on fine English porcelain, to suit the fancy environs. Meanwhile, there are her constants: the ways her figures feel sturdy as in Realist paintings, yet shrouded or suspended as in Surrealist ones, evoking a kind of magic that feels tantalizingly within reach.