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 […]
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 […]
Excerpt from Art in America article Architectural Light written by Barbara Kasten January 9, 2015 “For two years in the mid-1960s, when I was just out of college and ready to see the world, I lived and worked in various cities in Germany. It was my first time in Europe, and I was impressed by […]
An exert from Alex Klein’s interview from Hillman Photography Initiative – Carnegie Museum of Art “Curation can be a kind of storytelling—it is a chance to narrate or reframe an artist’s practice, but it is also a conversation. For the past two years I have been spending time with the artist Barbara Kasten as we […]
Aperture Magazine Issue 214 Spring 2014
A forward written by Barbara Kasten The seventh volume of C Photo, Photographicness, is an introduction to the photographic language of fourteen artists who are undergoing new explorations into the material qualities of the medium and the image‐making process. Each artist has developed a portfolio that reveals their work processes, emphasising the way in which they carry out their current investigations and specific projects. This publication is the result of the diversity of their approaches, which provide a constellation of ideas that are as thoughtful as they are materially inventive. Link to the website
In 2009 artist and writer Sarah Trigg embarked on an ambitious field expedition across the United States, interviewing more than 200 artists in their studios. She’sat down with everyone, from painters to performance artists, to investigate a wide range of artmaking practices. The result is Studio Life, a fascinating photographic and written account of 100 […]
London’s largest gathering of visual art and contemporary intellect has arrived (continue reading…)
Galerie Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf ‘SCENES’ exhibition: May 24 – July 6, 2013. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Published June 6, 2013 In conversation: the photographer Barbara Kasten All That Postmodern Stuff Questions asked by Magdalena Kröner. The American photo-artist Barbara Kasten is currently experiencing a late but stellar career. A conversation on the chromaticity of black and […]
“Barbara Kasten Geometric Abstraction on Photography,” Vision Magazine China, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA
“Barbara Kasten,” Joseph Akel. Freize Magazine, Issue 154, April 2013, Reviews: Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, pg 168s
Editorial in Beirut-based A Magazine’s August/September issue
In interview with Art In America’s Courtney Fiske
The New Yorker cited Constructs, Abrasions, Melons, Cucumbers at Bortolami Gallery in their July “Short List.”
Included in New City’s recent list of 50 artist’s artists in Chicago
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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.
“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 […]
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.