chasing rabbits is Katja Seib’s first exhibition at ChaÌ‚teau Shatto, opening on September 21, 2019, and celebrated with a reception from 6—9pm. Born and trained in Düsseldorf and living in Los Angeles, the occasion also marks Seib’s first solo presentation in the United States. In Katja Seib’s absorbing paintings, the artist presents entanglements of observational reality and illusion. Seib renders a material world that centers on human subjects, while encouraging traces of memory and projections of psychology to interrupt these scenes. Working primarily in portraiture, Seib's paintings carry intimate narratives and quiet dramas, suggesting the latent symbolism and simmering psychology that form the undercurrents of empirical experience. Her work dispels the boundary between what is objectively apparent and illusions that articulate emotional or psychological swelling. To borrow phrasing from T.J. Clark, Seib’s paintings feast on the ‘ability painting has, perhaps more than any other means of representation, to imagine the world transfigured.’ Often painting on raw hessian and non-traditional surfaces, such as patterned textiles, Seib urges an interplay between surface texture and brushwork, and in doing so, allows these textiles to perform different roles within a picture. In strange without a stranger, a red nimbus surrounds a male subject. This vermillion glow falls off into the patterned background, connecting the figure to the textile that hosts him. The large untreated areas of the red floral patterning on a blue ground appear as a surface behind the figure, possibly wallpaper. Within the figure, Seib subdues the bright textile with white paint and incorporates it as patterning in the briefs worn by her subject.