Sasha Katz (Russian, b. 1984) is a visual artist who works with digital sculpting in dialogue with the visual language of photography.,Her hyperreal, sensual female figures draw on Mannerism and the grotesque, exaggerating distinctive facial and bodily features to challenge conventional ideas of beauty. She has developed seven recurring heroine characters since 2020, each one, in her words, “a mirror of my own identity and voice”.
Katz studied Illustration at the British Higher School of Arts and Design before turning her focus to the human figure in 2020.,She cites the excess and artifice of Mannerism, particularly the École de Fontainebleau, as a guiding influence, alongside cinema and the paintings her grandfather made. She has said that before entering crypto art, she took on more client commissions, work that gave her less creative freedom than her own practice.
Recurring series include Sleep Paralysis (2022), influenced by Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting The Nightmare and staged with black cats intertwined among half-asleep bodies.In Yakamoz (2023), women appear underwater, its title borrowed from the Turkish word for moonlight shimmering on the sea's surface.,Les Baigneuses, exhibited at DANAE Gallery in Paris in 2024, reworks the bathers motif through the Slavic folklore figure of the mavka, the spirit of a drowned woman who lures the living into water.In September 2024, Fakewhale presented her two-piece release In your car, part of her Erotic Diaries series, depicting a fleeting encounter inside a stranger's car.
In 2022, her work was shown in “Singularity” at the Decentral Art Pavilion in Venice, staged in parallel with the Venice Biennale, and she created Gucci Flora for a group show and auction marking Gucci's centenary, presented with SuperRare.,In 2023, her early erotic works were included in “Natively Digital, Oddly Satisfying”, Sotheby's inaugural digital art and NFT auction in Paris.She is represented by Galerie Charlot and held a solo exhibition, “Sasha Katz and Guests”, at Galerie Data in Paris in 2025, pairing her cinema- and symbolism-inflected 3D portraits with guest works.,That year, her work Saltwater was shown at DANAE in Paris as part of “You Were Never Solid”, a group exhibition on hydrofeminism, where the piece turns grief into an ocean made of tears.
