Exhibition view: Barbara Kasten: Works, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, (21 March–8 November 2020).

© Barbara Kasten. Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Photo: Marek Kruszewski

Abstraction rebels against convention and allows us to see the world in a new way, challenging entrenched beliefs.

– Barbara Kasten

Space as a stage of a changing reality is the central motif of Barbara Kasten’s photographs and film installations. Barbara Kasten’s works are produced in an “interdisciplinary performance” between photography, sculpture, architecture, and painting. Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten has been constructing expansive installations made of architectural “props” such as glass, mirrors, or wood constructions in front of the camera for her abstract “photographs.” These theatrical arrangements are restaged with colored light, an approach going back to Barbara Kasten’s roots as a painter and sculptor.

Barbara Kasten, Inside Out Sculpture (2020). Exhibition view: Barbara Kasten: Works, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

(21 March–8 November 2020). © Barbara Kasten. Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Photo: Andreas Beitin.

During her sojourn in Germany in the 1960s, she intensively engaged with the Bauhaus and modernism’s notions of space, stage, and architecture. While living in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, the “Light and Space Movement” had an influence on her subsequent work. Barbara Kasten’s cross-genre practice, her continued use of analog photographic materials and her “predigital vision” heralding the digital image vocabulary as of Photoshop or 3D rendering influenced a new generation of contemporary artists.

Exhibition view: Barbara Kasten: Works, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (21 March–8 November 2020). © Barbara Kasten. Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Photo: Marek Kruszewski

It is an object that has a photograph as the base, a sculpture relief attached to it, and light going through it creating another level of shadows. This is the epitome of everything I have been working with, which is the illusion of photography, the sculptural identity of the work that I photograph, and light, which is an element that is essential to everything that I do.

– Barbara Kasten about her “Progression” Series.

Director Dr. Andreas Beitin takes you online to the exhibition Barbara Kasten: Works.

Barbara Kasten staging her installation for the exhibition Centric 2, California State University, Long Beach, California, 1982 & Barbara Kasten in her studio 2016

Artists working in lens-based mediums often refer to the “magical moment” that comes in the darkroom when the image appears. For me that moment has always come in the studio when light adds life to the set.

– Barbara Kasten

installation view Color Mania – Materialität Farbe in Fotografie und Film, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, 2019

Production of Architectural Site 19, Pavillion for Japanese Art LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, July 19, 1989

Each picture is the result of meticulous preparation. Adhering to the cinematic process, Barbara Kasten directed a crew of professional lightning technicians to use color gels to carefully illuminate the postmodern architecture and her installations of large-scale mirrors placed within the frame of the image. The production was planned months in advance with research, sketches and test shoots before the final recording on 4x5 film. Color art photography was completely new in the 1980s, having originated for product and advertising advertising photography.

Production of Architectural Site 19, Pavillion for Japanese Art LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, July 19, 1989

In Kasten’s compositions, the foreground and background merge to an abstract, painterly surface, intensified by the color of the large-format cibachrome prints. Instead of staging the postmodern architecture, the “Architectural Sites” turn space into a mise-en-scène to restage an autonomous illusion.

Light is of vital importance to architects, just as it is to photographers and sculptors.

– Barbara Kasten

Each video made its own statement about the space as well as about the show.

– Barbara Kasten about her site-specific video installations Axis, Scenario and Corner.

Barbara Kasten, Axis (2015). Video projection. Exhibition view: Barbara Kasten: Stages, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (4 February–16 August 2015). © Barbara Kasten. Courtesy the artist, Bortolami Gallery, New York, Thomas Dane Gallery and Kadel Willborn Gallery, Düsseldorf. Photo: Constance Mensh.

Barbara Kasten at Parallels, Philara Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany, 2018. Photo: Susanne Diesner.

Barbara Kasten was born in the United States in 1936, she lives in Chicago. Her works are included in institutional collections such as those of the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate Modern London, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum Washington DC, the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. Most recently Barbara Kasten has presented solo exhibitions at Aspen Museum and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg which travels to Sammlung Ingvild Goetz in 2022. Other recent exhibitions have been her solo presentations at Philara Collection in Düsseldorf (2018), the ICA Philadelphia (2015) and the MoCA Los Angeles (2016). She recently presented her works in international group exhibitions including “Women in Abstraction” at Centre Pompidou, the Sharjah Biennale 14, “Bauhaus and America”, LWL – Landesmuseum Münster, “History of Photography” at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, “Shape of Light” at Tate Modern London, and “Color Mania” at the Fotomuseum Winterthur.