Paul Sietsema

Paul Sietsema (born 1968) is a Los Angeles–based American artist who works primarily in film, painting and drawing.

His work addresses the production, consumption, and proliferation of cultural objects, reflecting his interest in the possibility of an artwork to mediate information or meaning in a way that engages with the aesthetics of a specific time period.

In the words of Sarah Robayo Sheridan, “Paul Sietsema compounds organic and artificial detritus in all his artwork, scavenging in history’s wake to identify specific tools of cultural production and foraging for concepts of art promulgated in the words of artists and attitudes of critics.

He mines film as a vestige, the medium of the mechanical age, pressing and squeezing its very obsolescence through a contemporary sieve.

In so doing, the artist hovers in the switchover between a bodily inscription in the image and a fundamental reconstitution of sight and representation in the matrix of the virtual.

Where body stops and image starts is a divide collapsing through a series of innovations and accidents that go back as far as the people of Pompeii trapped in an emulsion that marked their death, but which paradoxically carried forward their image into eternity.”

Sietsema was born in Southern California and moved to Northern California as a teenager.

He attended high school in Mill Valley and became involved in the Bay Area punk scene revolving around clubs such as the Mabuhay Gardens and the On Broadway in San Francisco in the early to mid 1980s.

Since the late 1990s, Sietsema has created nine 16mm films and one 35mm film.

Sietsema's most recent 16mm film, At the hour of Tea, debuted in his survey exhibition organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts.

In 1992, Sietsema visited the first US solo exhibition of Jeff Koons, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which proved to be an influence on his early thinking and work.

Sietsema completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1992.

In 1994, the American painter Peter Saul included Sietsema in a group exhibition he curated in Austin, Texas.

While a student at UCLA, Sietsema self-published a series of three books documenting the performances he made there, which were often sculpture based.

During this time, he worked in the studios of Chris Burden and Charles Ray.

Sietsema also met the artist Dan Graham while at UCLA, who included Sietsema's early work in a group exhibition he curated at 303 Gallery in New York.

He enrolled in UCLA's New Genres graduate program in 1996 and began studying with Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray, receiving his MFA in 1999.

Sietsema's first solo exhibition took place at Brent Petersen Gallery in Los Angeles in 1998, where he exhibited his first 16mm film, Untitled (Beautiful Place).

Following this exhibition, Artforum published a feature article by Bruce Hainley on Sietsema's work.

Hainley included Sietsema in his 2000 group exhibition, “Mise-en-Scene: New LA Sculpture” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and Untitled (Beautiful Place) was included in the large survey, “The Americans: New Art,” at the Barbican Gallery in London, 2001.

The Belgian curator Jan Hoet visited the artist at his studio in 2000 and invited him to participate in the international exhibition “Sonsbeek 9” in 2001 in the Netherlands.

“Sonsbeek 9” published a book by Sietsema, Construction of Vision, in conjunction with the exhibition.

Hoet, a friend of Marcel Broodthaers, educated Sietsema about the artist's work and showed him many of Broodthaers’ pieces in both private and public collections in Belgium.

In 2002, Sietsema's second solo show in Los Angeles took place at Regen Projects, where he exhibited the film Empire.

This film and additional material (drawings and constructions) comprised Sietsema's first solo museum exhibition, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2003.

Empire was included in a group exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2004.

In 2005, curators Daniel Birnbaum, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Gunnar Kvaram invited Sietsema to participate in the exhibition “Uncertain States of America” at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, which travelled to the Hessel Museum at Bard College, the Serpentine Galleries, and additional venues in Poland, Iceland, China, and Russia.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a solo exhibition in 2008 to debut Sietsema's third film, Figure 3.

The artist's work also was included in the Carnegie International and the 5th Berlin Biennial in 2008, and later that year, the De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam mounted a survey exhibition, “Paul Sietsema: Three Films,” featuring Untitled (Beautiful Place), Empire, and Figure 3.

In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a solo exhibition of Sietsema's work, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid mounted a solo exhibition of Sietsema's films and drawings.

That same year, Sietsema moved to Berlin on a DAAD residency, and in 2010 he had a solo show at the Schinkel Pavillon, which featured his 16mm film Anticultural Positions, in 2010.

Upon returning to Los Angeles from Berlin in 2011, Sietsema began teaching in the graduate department at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California as a visiting core faculty member.

He continued to teach at USC for three years before deciding to devote his time to being an advisor in post-graduate studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam at the urging of Dan Graham, who had been involved with the school for many years, along with Joan Jonas.

Sietsema continues to hold this advisory position today.

The artist's first solo show with Matthew Marks Gallery took place in New York in 2011, and the Kunsthalle Basel organized a solo exhibition in 2012.

Sietsema and the Kunsthalle Basel exhibition's curator, Adam Szymczyk, collaborated with writer Quinn Latimer and designer Manuel Raeder on a book of collected interviews in conjunction with the exhibition, Paul Sietsema: interviews on films and works.

The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, organized a survey exhibition spanning five years of work in 2013, which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Sietsema mounted his next exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York in 2014.

The show featured his new 35mm film Abstract Composition.

The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco's Villa Paloma presented an exhibition of new paintings and a recent film, At the hour of tea in Monaco in 2015, and in 2016, the artist had his first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly fifteen years, at Matthew Marks Gallery.