Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, Chicago, Illinois) received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Space as a stage of a changing reality is the central motif of Barbara Kasten’s photography and film installations, which she produces in an ‘interdisciplinary performance’ between photography, sculpture, architecture, and painting, an approach going back to Kasten’s roots as a painter and sculptor. Since the 1970s, Kasten has been constructing expansive installations of ‘architectural props’ made with acrylic, mirrors, and wood in front of the camera for her abstract photographs and as sculptural installations. Her first major museum survey and monograph in the U.S., Barbara Kasten: Stages, originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and traveled to the Graham Foundation, Chicago and MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2015-16). The exhibition Barbara Kasten: Scenarios at the Aspen Art Museum (2020–21) focused exclusively on Kasten’s sculpture and video installations. In 2020 and 2022, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Sammlung Goetz, Munich presented her first European museum survey, Barbara Kasten WORKS. A forthcoming installation will open at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, England, in June 2024. Other recent international exhibitions include Re-Inventing Piet.Mondrian and the Consequences, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Wilhelm Hack Museum, Germany (2023–24); Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, and Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain (2021); the 2020 Busan Biennale, South Korea; Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, Tate Modern, London, UK (2018); Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2019); Bauhaus and America, LWL - Landesmuseum Münster (2018). Among many other public and private collections, her work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Her latest monograph, “Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015-2020),” features interdisciplinary works created since 2015.
Image: Collision 5 T, 2016, Digital chromogenic print on Fujiflex Crystal Archive, 63 x 48 inches