Recent Press

Louisiana Channel: Barbara Kasten | Light is the Essential Element

  “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.

ARTnews: Anonymous Was A Woman Names 2023 Winners, Including Artists Dindga McCannon, Carolina Caycedo, Barbara Kasten, Amanda Ross-Ho

  “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 […]

Museé Magazine: Barbara Kasten | Architecture and Film (2015–2020)

  “… 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 […]

Artnet News: 87-Year-Old Artist Barbara Kasten on How Her New Career-Defining Monograph Shows She’s More Than Just a Photographer

  “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 […]

Newcity Art: A Builder of Images: A Review of Barbara Kasten at Document Space

  “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 […]

Chicago Gallery News: After 50 Years Barbara Kasten Still Finds a New Perspective

  “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 […]

Artnet News: ‘It’s a Strength’: Watch Artist Barbara Kasten Explain Why Beautiful Art Isn’t as Powerless as She Once Thought

  “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 […]

The Aspen Times: Review of “Scenarios” at Aspen Art Museum

  “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 […]

Ocula: Barbara Kasten: Out of the Box

  “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.

Artnet News: Watch Artist Barbara Kasten Blend Pictures Into Mind-Bending Constructivist Compositions

  “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.

Art in America: Polaroid’s History Through Two Lenses: One Sanitized, One Playful

  “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 […]

Tate Etc. Issue 48: Barbara Kasten on Naum Gabo

  “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 […]

The New Yorker Reviews “Constructs 1981 – 1982”

  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