Barbara Kasten
Barbara Kasten
Space as a stage of a changing reality is the central motif of Barbara Kasten’s photographs and film installations. Barbara Kasten’s works are produced in an "interdisciplinary performance" between photography, sculpture, architecture, and painting. Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten has been constructing expansive installations made of architectural “props” such as glass, mirrors, or wood constructions in front of the camera for her abstract "photographs". These theatrical arrangements are restaged with colored light, an approach going back to Barbara Kasten’s roots as a painter and sculptor. During her sojourn in Germany in the 1960s, she intensively engaged with the Bauhaus and modernism’s notions of space, stage, and architecture. While living in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, the "Light and Space Movement" had an influence on her subsequent work. Barbara Kasten’s cross-genre practice, her continued use of analog photographic materials and her "predigital vision" heralding the digital image vocabulary as of Photoshop or 3D rendering influenced a new generation of contemporary artists.
Barbara Kasten was born in 1936 in the United States and lives and works in Chicago. Her works are included in major institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. In March, a major solo exhibition will open at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (PL). Currently, her work can be seen in Language and Image: Conceptual and Performance-Based Photography from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami (US), and in Affinities: New Encounters in the Collection of Kunsthalle Recklinghausen at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (DE). Recent solo exhibitions include Barbara Kasten: Structure, Light, Land at The Glass House, New Canaan (US), and Site Lines at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (UK). Further solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (DE); Aspen Art Museum (both 2020); the Philara Collection, Düsseldorf (DE, 2018); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (US, 2015); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (US, 2016). Her work has been featured in numerous international group exhibitions, including Women in Abstraction at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sharjah Biennial 14; Bauhaus and America at LWL – Landesmuseum Münster; History of Photography at Sprengel Museum Hannover; Shape of Light at Tate Modern, London; and Color Mania at Fotomuseum Winterthur. In 2023, the Ingvild Goetz Collection dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to her, and several of her works were included in Re-Inventing Piet. Mondrian and the Consequences at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. In addition, Skira Editore published the large-scale monograph Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020), edited by Stephanie Cristello, with contributions by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Humberto Moro, and Mimi Zeiger.
