“It is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye” – Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography (1929) Abstract photography challenges our popular view of photography as an objective image of reality by reasserting its constructed nature. In his essay on the history of photography, Walter Benjamin articulates photography’s second nature [...]
ARTFORUM March 2012 Los Angeles: Barbara Kasten, Gallery Luisotti
From Huffington Post Arts: Haiku Reviews: From Vivaldi To Vivid Pop Art (PHOTOS) First posted: 01/06/2012 HuffPost Arts’ Haiku Reviews are biweekly features where we invite critics to review exhibitions and performances in short form. Some will be in the traditional Haiku form of 5x7x5 syllables, others might be a sonnet or even a string [...]
November 19, 2011 – January 7, 2012 Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Barbara Kasten: Experimental Photography from the 1970s, opening November 19th. Kasten’s early concern with the interplay between sculpture, light, and installation in her art mirrored the greater interest of the then burgeoning California light and space movement arising in [...]
Set Pieces October 24, 2011 By Anthony Pearson Barbara Kasten has been creating inventive and influential images for more than 40 years. Artist Anthony Pearson talked to her about theatricality, her approach to photography and what it means to ‘think like a painter’ Barbara Kasten’s artistic practice takes place in front of the camera as [...]
Barbara Kasten Talks With Heidi Norton October 21, 2011 GUEST POST BY HEIDI NORTON As a photography student of the mid/late 90′s, Barbara Kasten was of great significance to me. I lost track of her during the first decade of the millennium, as the contemporaries of the Becher’s school (Gursky, Ruff, Struth) dominated the art market with their [...]
Studio Construct 118, 2011 Eye Exam: Concrete Light Sep 27, 2011 By Regan Golden-McNerney Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten has been developing a distinct approach to abstract photography. Inspired by the simple forms used by Bauhaus artists from the 1930s, Kasten begins her process by arranging basic shapes and colored backdrops atop glass and mirrors. [...]
ARTFORUM 09.30.11 Author: Claudine Ise 09.09.11-10.15.11 Tony Wight Gallery Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kasten has been making abstract pictures that reveal and exploit the medium’s underlying properties—in particular, photography’s dependence on light to record material phenomena and its tendency to flatten or otherwise distort the viewer’s perceptions of a given volume, spatial relationship, or object. [...]
New Art GALLERY WEEKEND CHICAGO by Pedro Vélez The road to recovery starts with recognizing that you have a problem. The good news is that Chicago’s problem has finally been diagnosed. Local collectors are not powerful, sexy or charismatic enough to sustain or promote the city’s art scene. So instead of crying like little babies [...]
Meeting at the intersection of blue and white September 21, 2011|By Lori Waxman, Special to the Tribune We tend to think of collaboration as something that happens intentionally. A certain number of people agree to work together, and jointly they produce a project. These people might be scientists, they might be educators, they might be [...]
ineluctable 9 September – 22 October 2011 Press Release ineluctable -unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable Barbara Kasten’s newest series of abstract photographs records the consequential traces of light upon large-scale assemblages composed for the camera. Instead of using photography as record or reference, the physical object, which is the transparent Plexiglas plane, becomes [...]
Construct X-B, an 8 x 10 polaroid, is featured in Assouline’s De Beers Jewelry book.
Barbara Kasten Galerie Kadel Willborn Barbara Kasten, Construct VII-A, 1981 Since the late 1970s, Barbara Kasten’s photographic works have toed a line between the abstract potential of the medium and its inescapable referentiality. Born in Chicago in 1936 and schooled in the historical formal vocabulary of Constructivism, Kasten creates spatial arrangements which oscillate between the [...]
June 30 – August 4, 2011 Dana Hoey, Barbara Kasten, Allizon Katz, Alex Kwartler, Miranda Lichenstein, Andrew Masullo, Rebecca Morris, Mariah Robertson, Dan Torop, Roger White Friedrich Petzel Gallery 535 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011 www.petzel.com
Distilled Moments: Still Lifes from the Permanent Collection May 28 – September 18, 2011 This exhibition of 20th-century still life paintings and photographs, beginning with Pierre Bonnard’s Flowers in a Pitcher, produced in the early years of the 20th century and ending with Guillermo Srodek-Hart’s Gauchito Gil Sanctuary in 2006, hints at the range and [...]
24 June – 13 August 2011 Tony Wight Gallery is pleased to present Untitled Document, an exhibition of works by Andrew J. Greene, Barbara Kasten, Josh Kolbo, Nazafarin Lotfi, Sean Raspet, David Schutter, and Justin Swinburne. The exhibition will be on view from 24 June – 13 August 2011 Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday [...]
Polaroid [Im]possible at Weslicht 17.06.2011 – 28.08.2011 When the legendary Polaroid Collections of Europe & the USA were put on the market by the liquidators dealing with the assets of the insolvent company and they were going to be auctioned off by Sotheby’s New York, this caused a public outcry on the international photography circuit. [...]
“From Polaroid to Impossible. Masterpieces of Instant Photography. The WestLicht Collection” features Construct PC III C, a 20 x 24 Polaroid. Edited by Achim Heine, Rebekka Reuter, Ulrike Willingmann, texts by Achim Heine, Barbara P. Hitchcock, Florian Kaps, graphic design by Heine/Lenz/Zizka German/English 2011. 192 pp., 230 color ills. 25.30 x 32.50 cm hardcover The [...]
A Matter of Perspective May 14- June 25, 2011 Galerie Kadel Willborn Hirschstraße 45 76133 Karlsruhe Germany Barbara Kasten’s photographs do not narrate and document stories, instead, they are a “print” of the abstract features of light and shadow. In the 1970s she began experimenting with photochemical reactions and photograms, which she painted over using [...]
My work is mentioned in the March 2011 issue of ARTnews in Rebecca Robertson’s article “Building Pictures.” Studio Construct 69 (2008, pictured above) is featured on page 78. Read the article online and pick up a copy of the magazine at your local bookstore.
Remix—Barbara Kasten w/ Lucky Dragons March 12 – May 31, 2011 Opening Reception: Friday, March 11, 6-8pm Hours: Every following Friday and Saturday, 1-5pm and by appointment 845 West Washington Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60607 Applied Arts is excited to present a multi-channel video installation by Barbara Kasten featuring sound by Lucky Dragons. Barbara Kasten is [...]
I am included in the publication L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists before 1980. “L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980″ is the first comprehensive pictorial showcase of the diverse universe of artists working in the Los Angeles area during the formative period of Los Angeles’ art history. Over 800 color and 100 black and white images of [...]
Barbara Kasten, Construct VI-B 1981 Barbara Kasten and Alexandra Leykauf 27th January – 26th February 2011 Carl Freedman Gallery 44a Charlotte Road, London www.carlfreedmangallery.com The montaging of history and place is at the heart of Alexandra Leykauf’s practice. Pictorial compositions are made through the juxtaposition or superimposition of photographic reproductions or photocopies of source photographs [...]
Cornell Fine Arts Museum Organized by Aperture Foundation January 14 – March 27, 2011 From the beginning, abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography, curated by Lyle Rexer, showcases the work of more than twenty contemporary photographers who base [...]
3 October 2010 – 20 February 2011, “Immaterial,” Curated by Fairfax Dorn Ballroom Marfa’s Fall exhibition, Immaterial, will focus on the physical and psychic tensions between form, color and space across varied visual and structural mediums. The exhibition seeks to examine the metaphysical aspects of artistic production through a selection of artworks that challenge the [...]
“Just a Matter of Time” July 4 – September 4, 2010 Allan McCollum, Barbara Kasten, Jimmy Robert, Katja Strunz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jennifer West The sequence of individual actions results in a specific present time. Past actions are part of this present, which is itself merely a passage to the future. In different ways, the artists Barbara Kasten, [...]
Barbara Kasten – “Abstracting…Light” May 6 – June 22 2010 Organized in collaboration with Olivier Renaud-Clément Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Barbara Kasten in France in twenty years, “abstracting… light”. With this exhibition she continues the ongoing research residing at the core of her practice since the 1970s: [...]
In a Paperweight Walead Beshty, Sebastiaan Bremer, Daniel Gordon, Tamar Halpern, Barbara Kasten, Sara VanDerBeek and James Welling 16 April – 15 May 2010 Opening Reception: 16 April, 5–8pm “Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine [...]
Karl Haendel & Walead Beshty Sheree Hovsepian Barbara Kasten Opening Reception: Saturday, March 20, 4-7pm Monique Meloche 2154 W. Division (New Location) Chicago, IL 60622
Let There Be Geo Curated by Elizabeth Burke-Dain March 4 – April 24, 2010 Opening reception: March 4, 5-8 pm Let there be Geo takes a contemporary look at visual artists who use geometric form in their work. While geometric form is not a new phenomenon, geo forms are appearing in some of the most [...]
Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970 – 1980 Cincinnati Art Museum, February 13 – May 9, 2010 Garish, pedestrian and commercial – that’s how critics characterized color photography in the 1970s. It was in fact an explosion of color and the beginning of a new form of art. Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 is [...]
SHADOW = LIGHT January 16 – March 13 Gallery Luisotti Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30-6pm at Bergamot Station 2525 Michigan Ave. bldg a2 Santa Monica CA 90404 In her latest exhibition, Kasten traces back to a familiar theme that has informed her practice since the 1970s: the interplay between light and form. The exhibition will feature [...]
“The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography” by Lyle Rexer, a book published by Aperture, is now available. One of my 20×24 Polaroid from 1981 is the frontispiece for the book and two Studio Constructs appear on pages 160-161.
“Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980,” a full color catalogue published by by Hatje Cantz and distributed by DAP/Distributed Art Publishers and including texts by Kevin Moore, James Crump and Leo Rubinfien. The catalogue will be released in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition in Cincinnati and can be purchased ($70) at the Cincinnati [...]
“Through a Glass Darkly” is a new trans-media, site specific installation in which Kasten explores her relationship to the phenomenology of light in the process of image-making. This is a partial view of the installation at SubCity Projects.
Barbara Kasten presents her work Studio Construct 17 as based on physical constructions that play with light and are created only for the purpose of being photographed. By this approach, the photograph itself becomes the object and is removed from being representative or documentary. Kasten expands that while subject matter is inherent to photography, her [...]
This podcast features an audio recording of a conversation with photographer Barbara Kasten dated March 22, 1982. Listen to it here.