“Artist Barbara Kasten has been experimenting with photography since the early 1970s. Watch her show and explain how she works with everything from fluorescent plexiglass to materials she finds in the hardware store.” View the full video feature here.
“Anonymous Was A Woman, the grant-making nonprofit that has awarded over $7 million to women-identifying artists since 1996, has named the 15 winners of its 2023 grants. Each recipient will receive an unrestricted prize of $25,000 each. This year’s winners, who are nominated and then selected by a five-person jury (both anonymous), range in age […]
“… In all her works, from the blue meditations of the 1990s to the chromatic installations and films since 2015, the consistent thread remains her phenomenological approach to abstraction. Kasten’s exploration of light, space, and architecture is intrinsically interwoven, leading to a unique visual language that encapsulates the tangible and intangible elements of human […]
“Barbara Kasten’s best-known work is, in a sense, all about flattening. So good is she at this technique, though, that her successes have had a flattening effect on how her work has been received, understood, and supported. Fortunately, a new monograph from Skira looks to expand the narrative around the now 87-year-old artist.” Read […]
Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England March 10 – May 6, 2023 For her second solo exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery – Present Continuous – Barbara Kasten presents works from four distinct recent series, each exploring the language of geometry and grids. Grids that delineate space, create barriers or describe surfaces, but are seemingly without mass or density. Continue to the […]
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany Curated by Andreas Beitin and Elena Engelbrechter March 11 – July 16, 2023 With some 120 artworks and objects, the exhibition Re-Inventing Piet. Mondrian and the Consequences provides insight into the multifaceted exploration of Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic main work. Continue to the exhibition website.
Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, Germany January 21 – March 18, 2023 Barbara Kasten’s current show concentrates on spatial conditions and unconventional materiality to provide new perspective that stimulates abstract thinking and a new “architecture of seeing.” The connection between her Polacolor photographs from the early 1980s and her new works from the series SHIELD and […]
Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL January 13 – March 18, 2023 Reckless Rolodex highlights the lasting, though largely overlooked, influence of Lawrence Steger, described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the most important, and most influential, performance artists in Chicago during the late 1980s and 90s.” Lawrence Steger explored desire and sexuality […]
Kasmin, New York, NY Curated by Stephanie Cristello January 12 – February 22, 2023 Kasmin is pleased to present Shades of Daphne, a timely survey of painting, sculpture, installation, and film by a group of 11 international and intergenerational contemporary artists, many of whom have not previously exhibited in the United States. Bringing together recent […]
“At Document Space, Kasten’s large-scale photographs are only part of the whole piece. She has taken the construction out of the studio and into the gallery in a dramatically lit installation of four photographs archivally printed on linen. Wire fencing, lightly rusted, casts shadows on the white walls surrounding the printed images. The photographs […]
DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL November 4 – December 23, 2022 Across Kasten’s conceptual output—which has spanned the traditional genres of photography, painting, sculpture, installation, textile, theater, and performance—her recent investigations into architecture provide a fertile return to the basis of her artistic approach. Continue to the exhibition website.
La SIRA, Asnières-sur-Seine, Paris, France October 22 – November 18, 2022 On the occasion of the first edition of Paris+ by Art Basel, Shivers Only & Tonus presented an exhibition curated by Reine Aliénor at la SIRA. Continue to the exhibition website.
“As an accomplished artist with more than 50 years experience, Barbara Kasten is used to traveling back and forth to Europe for her work. But during these past two years, due to the pandemic she stayed close to home in Chicago. Fortunately, she had the space to create a home studio, and when it […]
Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany September 15, 2022 – April 29, 2023 The exhibition Barbara Kasten: Works is the American artist’s first survey exhibition in a European museum conceived in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. For its presentation at the Sammlung Goetz, the artist developed a site-specific color concept, which structures the exhibition space and the various groups of […]
Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, Germany May 13 – June 11, 2022 Is it true? is the fundamental question when one sees pictures in the media. While photography in its early days was still considered to be the objectively fixed proof of an event that actually took place, today, in times of numerous possibilities of image […]
Design Museum of Chicago, Chicago April 15 – 16, 2022 For their latest exhibition, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, IOTO have invited 100 Chicago-based artists to reflect on our shared experience of the last two years. This brief show will bring together a significant cross-section of the city’s creative community for a unique event. […]
Bortolami, New York, NY March 4 – April 30, 2022 Featuring four bodies of work, the show connects Barbara Kasten’s little-known sculptures from the 1970s to her most recent output. Each artwork is tied to her experimentation with fiberglass window screening, a material she began using in the early 1970s and throughout her forty-year […]
Case Chiuse HQ, Milan June 10th – October 1st, 2021 Case Chiuse HQ, in collaboration with Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Kadel Willborn Gallery, Düsseldorf, presents a selection of Constructs, large-format Polaroids the artist worked on between 1979 and 1986; three silver gelatin print from the Double Negative series, 2012–2016; and two large works, Collision 122(2019) and Transposition 12 (2014), both salt-sensitive chromogenic prints. All […]
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France 19 May – 23 August 2021 Traveled to Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain 22 October 2021 – 27 February 2022 The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with one hundred and six artists and more than five hundred works dating from the […]
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA April 17 – August 1, 2021 Conceived in conjunction with the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted suffrage for some women, this exhibition showcases more than one hundred photographs from the High’s collection, many of them never before on view, and charts the medium’s history from the dawn of the modern period to the present […]
“In an exclusive interview filmed as part of Art21’s Extended Play series in 2018, Kasten said she didn’t initially show the works because, ‘for a long time, I thought they were too beautiful’—a suggestion that might sound odd. But ‘in the 70’s, the rest of the world thought that beauty was a weakness.’” Read the full article […]
FracNormandie, Rouen, France Scenario 1: bodies, colours, materials March 13 – May 9, 2021 Scenario 2: Plan, image, sequence May 10 – August 15, 2021 One collection: Two scenarios presents a comprehensive overview of the works acquired by the Frac Normandie Rouen in recent years—since 2018—and offers two consecutive hanging schemes, whose focus and approach […]
“The exhibition is evidence of an artist still actively engaged in creative discovery and a continuing inquiry into image making that Kasten has carried on from the Bauhaus into her textile and painting work, her abstract photographs from the early days of Polaroids to today’s digital images, her stage-based sculptures and video projections. Her […]
“In this conversation, Kasten looks at the development of her practice in light of her recent survey shows, discussing the works that have defined her career, the perspectives that constrain it, and projects that have not been widely seen by the public.” Read the full article here.
“What is a photograph, really? Is it simply an image on a two-dimensional surface? What if it could be more? These are some of the questions the Chicago-born artist Barbara Kasten seeks to pose and answer in her complex photographic works, which straddle printmaking, sculpture, and textile combinations.” Read the full article here.
“There is an odd disconnect between the images on the wall and the cameras in the cases. Not simply anyone can take a picture such as Barbara Kasten’s abstract masterpiece Construct PC/2-A (1981). Produced using a rare 20-by-24 large-format Polaroid camera (one of which stands in the gallery), this image captures the kaleidoscopic interactions […]
Presented by Bortolami and Hannah Hoffman Hosted by Kristina Kite Gallery Los Angeles, CA 11 February – 4 April, 2020 Frieze LA week hours: Tuesday – Sunday from 11am – 6pm Continue to Exhibition Website
Double Negative 5, 2016 The Arts Club of Chicago Chicago, IL 16 January – 22 February, 2020 Opening Reception: Thursday, January 16th 6-8pm The Arts Club’s visual artist members exhibition will include locally, nationally, and internationally esteemed artists, working in a wide variety of media and a breadth of historical influences. Continue to Exhibition Website
Corbett vs. Dempsey Chicago, IL 17 January – 22 February, 2020 Opening Reception: Friday, January 17th 6-8pm Photographs made in Mies Van der Rohe’s iconic S.R. Crown Hall and a sculpture incorporating IIT student worktables with acrylic elements that capture light and dematerializes architectural space into abstraction. Continue to Exhibition Website
Construct LB 2, 1982 CHART New York, NY 8 November, 2019 – 18 January, 2020 CHART is pleased to present After Virginia, an homage to the distinguished gallerist Virginia Zabriskie (1927-2019) by revisiting her 1989 show “Abstraction in Photography”. Presented at her eponymous 724 Fifth Avenue gallery, the exhibition surveyed a range […]
Collision 121, 2019 Kadel Willborn 16 November – 21 December, 2019 Düsseldorf, Germany The title of the exhibition, “Abstract Horizons,” opens up new perspectives, referring to conceptual horizons of different worldviews. Since the early 1970s, abstraction has been at the core of Barbara Kasten’s work, which iscreated in an interdisciplinary performance between painting, architecture, sculpture, […]
Construct PC 2A, 1981 MIT Museum Cambridge, Massachusetts 23 February – 21 June, 2020 This unique exhibition explores various dimensions of the art-technology relationship through the exhibition of both art and artifacts. Featured will be over 250 original works by 175 artists, including […]
Construct PC 5 B, 1981 The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Moscow, Russia 19 November, 2019 – 26 January, 2020 The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts presents the exhibition “Daguerreotype, Autochrome, and Polaroid. 1/1” in celebration of the 180th anniversary of the invention of photography. Visitors will have the chance to see unique examples of […]
“Materiality occupied an important role in Gabo’s art too. He used unorthodox art materials that often related to commercial production, such as sheet metal, glass and plastics. With the same motivation in mind, I have used industrial materials marked by scratches and abrasions, the evidence of their human use a depiction of time. The […]
Constructs 1981 – 1982 Bortolami, NYC 28 June — 9 August, 2019 “If the taut geometries of a Constructivist painting could give their canvas confines the slip, they might stage something like the eye-teasing setups in the photographs of Barbara Kasten.” Read the full Review
Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania Vilnius, Vithuania 8 August – 22 September, 2019 Reception: Friday, 8 August at 6pm Borrowing the title from Kasten’s 1980’s series Construct NYC, the exhibition at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania features photographs by Barbara Kasten, John Divola, Wei-Li-Yeh, Ulrich Wüst, Marijonas Baranauskas, Romualdas Rakauskas and Itsuko Hasegawa. Continue to Exhibition […]
Bortolami New York, NY 28 June — 9 August, 2019 Bortolami is pleased to announce a viewing room presentation of Barbara Kasten’s Polaroids from the early 1980s. “At its core, Kasten’s work is concerned with the interplay of light, color, and geometry while challenging and manipulating her materials. Many of the components are staged in positions […]
Simon Lee New York, NY 27 June — 16 August, 2019 Photographs from the Constructs series are included in a wide-ranging survey exhibition at Simon Lee gallery, featuring work by artists whose studio-based practices span the past 130 years. Continue to Exhibition Website
The Warehouse Dallas, TX 05/20 – 11/11, 2019 The Sensation of Space is co-organized by The Warehouse in partnership with the Nasher Sculpture Center. The exhibition features works from The Rachofsky Collection, the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman, the […]
Color Mania – The Material of Color in Photography and Film Fotomuseum Winterthur 09/07 – 11/24, 2019 “Since the earliest days of cinema, film has been a colorful medium and art form. More than 230 film color processes have been devised in the course of film history, often in close connection with photography. For […]
Barbara Kasten Seated Form (red), 1972 Fiber and chair IN THE HOT SEAT April 26 – August 11, 2019 2nd-Floor Gallery Curated by Joey Yates Reception April 25th 6-8pm “In The Hot Seat offers insight into how the chair is being continually reimagined in contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition combines artist-made chairs with sculptures, […]
Barbara Kasten has several photographs from her 2018 residency at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s S. R. Crown Hall on view during the Mies van der Rohe Society’s celebration of the 133rd birthday of one of the greatest architects of the 20th Century as well as the 100th anniversary of the foundation of The Bauhaus. […]
The Expanded Photograph is an installment of the UNMAM permanent collection exhibition HINDSIGHT/INSIGHT: Reflecting on the Collection. On view in the newly renovated Van Deren Coke Gallery. Opening reception February 8, 2019. “The Expanded Photograph highlights rarely-exhibited objects from the UNMAM’s extensive photographic holdings. Featuring artists Thomas Barrow, Darryl Curran, Betty Hahn, James Hajicek, Robert […]
Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber “7 March – 10 June 2019, Sharjah Biennial 14 (SB14) will showcase three unique exhibitions, curated by Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons, that explore the possibilities and purpose of producing art when news is fed by a monopoly of sources, history is increasingly fictionalised, when ideas […]
Review: “Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon” Chicago’s talkiest season begins with a long, long chat at art expo. On Saturday afternoon, at the far end of Navy Pier, in a ballroom overlooking Lake Michigan, Hans Ulrich Obrist talked, and listened, then talked, and listened some more. He talked to 20 Chicago artists, poets, architects, essayists, […]
Aperture’s “Los Angeles” issue explores how one of America’s most photographed cities is also an essential hub for some of today’s most important photography and photo-based art. Barbara Kasten’s work is featured in the Rebecca More article Toward Poetic Vision: Robert Heinecken redefines the photograph. https://aperture.org/shop/aperture-232-magazine
THE WHITE REVIEW 22 features a series of artworks from Barbara Kasten. THE WHITE REVIEW is an arts and literature quarterly magazine, with triannual print and monthly online editions. The magazine launched in February 2011 to provide ‘a space for a new generation to express itself unconstrained by form, subject or genre’, and publishes fiction, essays, interviews with […]
June – July 27 – S. R. Crown Hall , IIT, 3360 S State St., Chicago, IL Bortolami is pleased to announce the initiation of the sixth Artist/City project, Barbara Kasten/Chicago. Chicago-based artist Barbara Kasten is the summer resident of Illinois Institute of Technology’s S. R. Crown Hall. Kasten will activate Mies van der Rohe’s […]
April 28 – December 30, 2018 – Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 220 E Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60611 “Drawn largely from the MCA’s permanent collection, Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography considers the artist’s work in the larger context of conceptual art. The exhibition also highlights links between Josephson and other contemporary artists working in photography, film, and sculpture… Continue to exhibition page
June 13 – September 2. Sprengel Museum Hannover, Kurt-Schwitters-Platz, 30169 Hannover “The exhibition series of the Sprengel Museum Hannover, which has been designed in several parts, attempts to provide an answer and presents decisive motives for the further development of recent photography history in the context of art. It is about a quantitatively reduced, but content-focused comparison of […]
2 MAY – 14 OCTOBER 2018 TATE MODERN, Bankside, London “Shape of Light is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between the two, spanning the century from the 1910s to the present day. It brings to life the innovation and originality of photographers over this period, and shows how they responded and contributed to the […]
22 February – 13 JULY 2018 SAMMLUNG GOETZ, MUNICH “The Sammlung Goetz celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2018 with a three-part exhibition dedicated to artistic creations by women. On display are nearly 200 works, ranging from drawings, photographs, paintings and sculptures to films and extensive installations by more than 40 artists in an intergenerational dialog. […]
21 – 25 February 2018 – ARCOmadrid, Madrid, Spain. “What is going to happen is not “the future”, but what we are going to do The ARCOmadrid 2018 edition will not have a guest country, but rather a concept as a guest: the future. A notion that everyone is talking about, yet one that’s hard […]
29 January – 15 April 2018 – University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach, California. Connecting innovative contemporary art with archival video footage, Under Cover: Where Collection and Archive Meet, brings important artworks from the UAM Collection into the light and views featured artists’ practice through a new lens. This exhibition highlights four artists – Eileen Cowin, […]
10 February – 22 April 2018 – Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California. “Brought to Light: Revelatory Photographs in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Collection presents a non-traditional survey of the Museum’s renowned collection of nearly 8,000 photographs. Based not on chronology or theme, the exhibition seeks to reveal new insights into well-known […]
02 February – 18 March 2018 – Philara Foundation, Dusseldorf, DE. “Having displayed her large retrospective Stages in the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia in 2015, the Chicago based Barbara Kasten will show her first retrospective exhibition in Germany with Parallels at Philara Collection.” Continue to exhibition webpage.
07 – 11 February, 2018 – Mexico City, Mexico “Endlessly experimental and restlessly innovative, her most recent body of work includes three-dimensional sculptural, photographic hybrids entitled Progressions (2017-2018), and freestanding acrylic sculptures—her first since the early 1970s.” Continue to exhibition page
10 February – 29 April 2018 – TATE St Ives, Porthmeor Beach, St Ives, Cornwall “Discover art from 1850 to the present, inspired by the writing of this celebrated author. Author of classic texts including To the Lighthouse and the pioneering feminist text A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf spent much of her childhood in St Ives. This exhibition is led by her writing, […]
the root of MY furY: on WoMen artists “getting their due”, by Julia Cooke Issue 22 / November 27, 2017 I stood at the Whitney Museum last autumn, looking for a second time at the Carmen Herrera exhibit. Numinous as the paintings in front of me appeared, quiet though their presence felt, the vague rabble […]
Pervy Snapshots and Fallible Machines: Around Openings in Tribeca by Joseph R. Wolin, September 18, 2017 Filling the impeccable new Bortolami space—pristine white walls, elegant black Corinthian columns—with a riot of sharp-angled color, the 81-year-old Barbara Kasten splits the difference between photography and sculpture in new reliefs that append pieces of tinted Plexiglas to photos of arrangements […]
‘Parti Pris’ by Barbara Kasten at Bortolami, New York By BLOUIN ARTINFO, September 21, 2017 Bortolami presents “Parti Pris,” Barbara Kasten’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Barbara Kasten’s artistic practice has always led her to be experimental with her artworks and in her eighth decade of her artistic journey she is on her way up […]
A Brief History of Polaroids in Art, from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol (and Beyond), By Scott Indrisek, July 12th, 2017 Beginning in the late 1940s, the Polaroid Corporation would change the face of contemporary photography, both for everyday consumers and for artists. While instant cameras were originally marketed to families and amateur shutterbugs, the […]
Collecting Madonnas, For Feminism’s Sake The Story of a Thing, As told to Emily Spivack, June 12, 2017 In this series for T, Emily Spivack, the author of “Worn Stories,” interviews creative types about their most prized possessions. The artist Barbara Kasten’s Madonnas are interspersed among other meaningful treasures from her family and travels — […]
The Spirit of Experimentation: Barbara Kasten and László Moholy-Nagy by Carol S. Eliel Volume 50, Number 3, 2017, pp. 321-324 This article discusses how László Moholy-Nagy’s practice has informed Barbara Kasten’s in the context of their shared interest in experimentation and in the interdisciplinary, explicating those terms in both modernist and contemporary contexts. It considers […]
#5WOMENARTISTS: Five Female Photographers You Should Know, by Lisa Hostetler, March 31, 2017 As a historian of photography, I’ve always been grateful that the medium’s canon contains a relatively large number of women’s names when compared to the other visual arts. Anna Atkins and Julia Margaret Cameron are well-known characters in the story of photography’s first […]
4 Things You Can’t Afford to Miss at miart 2017, by Hili Perlson, March 31, 2017 From design collectibles to context-based conceptual pieces, this small fair has it all. “Though we would always say hello to each other at openings, it was only last year that we decided it was time to become better acquainted,” Kasten […]
Shape shifter: decoding Barbara Kasten’s perplexing Plexiglas creations, by Natalie Rigg, February 9, 2017 The classical confines of London’s Thomas Dane Gallery have been reinvigorated with a vibrant new survey of Barbara Kasten’s abstract works. On view through 25 May, ‘Intervals’ comprises a tightly edited overview of the Chicago-based artist’s oeuvre, which spans four decades […]
Gallery Hopping: Barbara Kasten’s Experiments With Light and Sculpture at Thomas Dane, by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, February 10, 2017 It’s the first solo exhibition in the UK of the Chicago-based artist. London’s Thomas Dane Gallery has staged the very first solo exhibition in the UK of Barbara Kasten, featuring both recent and historic works spanning more that 40 […]
On Defiance: How women have resisted representational photography, by Eva Respini, Aperture 225, “On Feminism”, (Winter 2016) The winter issue of Aperture, “On Feminism,” arrives at a moment when the power and influence women hold on the world stage is irrefutable, and the very idea of gender is central to conversations about equality across the country, and […]
Art 50 2016 Chicago’s Artists’ Artists Contributing authors: Kerry Cardoza, Ciera McKissick, Lee Ann Norman, Chris Reeves, Elliot J. Reichert, Anastasia Karpova Tinari and B. David Zarley. “Barbara Kasten: Stages,” the artist’s first major survey, opened last year at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Since then, the interdisciplinary artist has been everywhere. “Stages” travelled […]
Theaster Gates, Nick Cave among Chicagoans set for PBS showcase, by Kyle MacMillan The innovative, Bauhaus-influenced photography of Barbara Kasten, a native Chicagoan who moved back to the city in 1998, mediates between two and three dimensions. She was featured in a 2015 survey that was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and […]
Barbara Kasten by Honora Shea HANNAH HOFFMAN GALLERY Barbara Kasten’s photographs and moving images have a lot to say about the relationships between perception and physical reality, and even the complicated dialogue between an image and its author. The oldest works in the show, “Constructs LB 1-6,” 1982, are small color Polaroid prints, which vibrantly record […]
Barbara Kasten: Stages, by Eva Recinos In a digital era that knows full well not to trust the images seen on the Internet, or even in person, it’s expected that we might approach photographs with a hint of reserve. How much of what we see is “true” to the extent that it looked just that […]
Experimental photography: Barbara Kasten ‘Stages’ retrospective at MoCA, by Charlotte Jansen, Art, June 2, 2016 Bauhaus professor, painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy once said that ‘the salvation of photography comes from the experiment’. In the 200 years since the first camera photographs were produced, the uses of the medium and its subject matter has expanded wildly – yet […]
Playtime, by Susanna Newbury, X-TRA Summer 2016, Volume 18, Number 4 Lately, Barbara Kasten’s photographs have been extolled as precedents for a new generation of artists fascinated with photomaterialist processes. Often considered as a prehistory for contemporary discussions of analogic truth and sleights of indexicality, her works also famously engage styles of postmodernism: its architecture, its […]
Take another look: The alternative world of ‘Barbara Kasten: Stages’, by David Pagel, June 8, 2016 “Barbara Kasten: Stages” makes you wonder why the Museum of Contemporary Art doesn’t organize more exhibitions like this: right-sized surveys of works by artists who are not superstars but whose oeuvres enrich a visitor’s understanding of the present. Organized […]
A conversation between artists Barbara Kasten and Amanda Ross-Ho for MOCA. The dialogue took place by phone from Kasten’s studio in Chicago and Ross-Ho’s studio in Los Angeles. This is part one of a two-part discussion and the first time the artists have spoken. Continue to site.
Review of The Art of Our Time at MOCA Grand, by Evan Moffitt, September 23, 2015 When Helen Molesworth came to Los Angeles this year to replace Paul Schimmel as MOCA’s Chief Curator, many lauded her arrival as the museum’s saving grace. Her brilliant reinstallation of the permanent collection is proof that they were right. […]
Review of Barbara Kasten at ICA Philadelphia, By Devika Singh, August 2015 Barbara Kasten’s giant Polaroids and cibachromes speak to our digital age from an analogue past that feels incredibly close. While our contemporary nostalgia for obsolete gizmos and technological processes often attaches itself to tired retro references, Kasten’s exuberant photo constructions of the 1980s have […]
Barbara Kasten’s Slippery Analog Photography, by Harry Swartz-Turfle, August 2015 PHILADELPHIA — Talking about the limitations of photography, painter David Hockney said that art “must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.” At the time, he was pessimistic about the medium’s possibilities. Enter Barbara Kasten. Kasten’s work looks like it’s from the […]
Alles ohne Pixel! By Claudia Bodin, July, 2015 (text not available in English) “Barbara Kasten steht in den Ausstellungsräumen des Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia vor einer ihrer Arbeiten. Es ist eines der Fotogramme von 1975, mit denen alles begann. Damals legte die Künstlerin Maschensiebe auf lichtempfindliches Papier. Sie experimentierte mit Chemikalien und […]
The Painstaking Process of Barbara Kasten’s “Stages” by Hannah Stamler, Mondern Painters, May 3, 2015 “This well-deserved survey, on view at ICA Philadelphia from February 3 to August 16, tracks the genesis of Barbara Kasten’s practice from the artist’s early woven sculptures to her transition to photography in the 1970s and output from the past […]
Set Motion, April 28, 2015 “A restlessly inventive and experimental artist, Kasten began making art in the 1970s, engaging with Bauhaus pedagogy, Constructivism, the California Light and Space Movement, and Postmodern architecture and design. Her work sits at the intersection between photography, sculpture and installation, and this exhibition at Bortolami brings together two important bodies […]
Barbara Kasten: Refracted Light by Drew Sawyer, April 3, 2015 “Since the late 70s, Chicago-based artist Barbara Kasten has produced photographic work that exploits the medium’s inherent tension between representation and abstraction. She often builds large-scale models in her studio, or works with existing architecture, translating and altering space through mirrors, lighting, and compositional tricks…” […]
An excerpt from the Art in America review by Serena Qiu, April, 2015 “The ground floor galleries of the Institute of Contemporary Art currently house “Stages,” the first and sorely overdue survey of Barbara Kasten’s photography-based, multi-medium practice. As a prismatic allusion, the show’s title bundles the themes of the exhibition: the theatricality of Kasten’s expansive process, the […]
An excerpt from The New Yorker article, April 2015 “Active since the nineteen-seventies, the septuagenarian photographer of abstracted still-lifes has been rediscovered in recent years, in part because of her affinity with and influence on young hot shots like Liz Deschenes, Eileen Quinlan, and Jessica Eaton…” Continue to article
An excerpt from ArtNet.com article by Christian Viveros-Fauné, April 20, 2015 “To paraphrase one astute museum curator, people should continually question who gets to be a contemporary artist today. That goes double for Barbara Kasten, a long under-recognized artist working in varied yet evidently sympathetic media like sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation…” Continue to article
An excerpt from ArtNet.com article by David Ebony, April 22, 2015 “Coinciding with Barbara Kasten’s career retrospective currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (see Christian Viveros-Fauné Selects 15 Artists to Watch in 2015), this exhibition, “Set Motion,” gives New York audiences a chance to explore Kasten’s experiments in melding photography with […]
An excerpt from MutalArt.com article by Natalie Hegert, April 22, 2015 “Barbara Kasten: Stages,” curated by Alex Klein at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, is the first major survey of Kasten’s work, from her fiber sculptures from the early 1970’s, to a newly commissioned site-specific installation involving a nearly 30-foot-high video projection interacting […]
An excerpt from MutalArt.com article by Natalie Hegert, April 22, 2015 “Barbara Kasten: Stages,” curated by Alex Klein at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, is the first major survey of Kasten’s work, from her fiber sculptures from the early 1970’s, to a newly commissioned site-specific installation involving a nearly 30-foot-high video projection interacting […]
An excerpt from the New York Times review of SET MOTION by Martha Schwendener, April 23, 2015 “Like her current retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Barbara Kasten’s show in Chelsea includes both old and new work that serves to highlight connections and continuities across several decades…” Continue to article
An excerpt from photograph magazine’s interview with Barbara Kasten by Lyle Rexer, March/April, 2015 “Barbara Kasten prefers not to call her exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphiathrough August 16 a retrospective. More like a report from the field. Her show Stages contains some 70 pieces, from early fabric works to wall projections made specifically […]
An excerpt from ARTFORUM online review of SET MOTION at Bortolami Gallery by Piper Marshall, April, 2015 “Barbara Kasten did not study with Josef Albers, but the Bauhaus ghosts her work. The photographs on view in her latest exhibition are constructions, geometric props positioned to throw colored light and shadows across the page. The plastic forms in these […]
An excerpt from THE SEEN’s review of Barbara Kasten: Stages by Joshua Michael Demaree, March 25, 2015 “Photographer Barbara Kasten’s work is like a jolt of electricity to the eye. Her signature pieces that feature the fragmentation of form coupled with a studied use of color is instantly striking, capturing the eye’s attention even thirty years after […]
Interview: Barbara Kasten by Leslie Hewitt, March, 2015 “I had the chance to finally meet artist Barbara Kasten, after admiring her work from a distance since the late ’90s. We met formally through the exhibition The Material Image, curated by Deb Singer in 2014. The exhibition explored aspects of material specificity and medium definitions, among other […]
An excerpt from Art Press online interview The Movement of Memory an interview with Sara VanDerBeek, March, 2015 “Sara VanDerBeek belongs to the young generation of American photographers involved in the medium’s redefinition. Echoing the article « Paradoxical Abstraction » published in artpress, 420, March 2015, the artist talks to Etienne Hatt about abstraction, the importance of Barbara Kasten […]
An excerpt from Philly.com article Art: The Many Aspects of Barbara Kasten, March 15, 2015 by Thomas Hine “It is often easier to understand and respond to art that is either very old or very new than to the work of the recent past, two or three decades ago. After all, we are living in the same moment […]
An excerpt from PIN-UP Magazine’s online article Casting Light, February 11, 2015 “After a career spanning over five decades without a major survey show, artist and photographer Barbara Kasten is finally getting her place in the spotlight. “Barbara Kasten: Stages”, now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, is the first in-depth examination of the artist’s […]
Excerpt from the article in Architectural Digest, Daily Ad by Hannah Martin, February 9, 2015 “Artist Barbara Kasten’s abstract geometric photographs gained traction amid the spirited postmodernist climate of the 1980s. Mashups of color, shape, and shadow, the pictures represented sculptural assemblages of objects and props in a two-dimensional format. Now, in “Barbara Kasten: Stages,” […]
An excerpt from ArtForum.com 500 words by Andrianna Campbell, January 31, 2015 “LIGHT IS THE ESSENCE OF PHOTOGRAPHY, but it is not what I am after. The important thing about light, to me, is not how it falls on an object, but how the shadow is created. I am photographing the shadow, and not the object […]