Barbara Kasten

(Chicago, Illinois, 1936 - )

American

Barbara Kasten’s practice centers around an exploration of the nature of perception and materiality. Her photographic work has been essential in influencing the last decade of multi-disciplinary practice in sculpture, video, installation, and public art. Her works from this period continue to examine an object’s presence within both illusionistic and real space. When she captures arrangements of objects with a camera, form is flattened, the surface is imbued with depth, and objects oscillate between figuration and abstraction, and spatial dimensions are merged. Kasten notes in an interview, “Light is the essence of photography, but it is not what I am after…I am after another form—one that defines reality, but it is not reality. I am after a phenomenological encounter.”
Barbara Kasten's early analog practice is rooted in Constructivism, the work of László Moholy-Nagy, and the ideas of the Bauhaus, filtered through two formative West Coast experiences, as well as a short period in New York. After getting her BFA in painting at the University of Arizona, Kasten moved to San Francisco to study fiber art under Trude Guermonprez, at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC). Guermonprez was part of a wave of Bauhaus-inspired teachers coming from Black Mountain College who brought European avant-garde principles to the U.S., emphasizing material experimentation, process, and the integration of art and craft. This foundation in textile arts and Bauhaus methodology—with its focus on construction, materiality, and spatial relationships—would prove foundational to Kasten's later photographic work. Equally influential was her early job as a stylist and display dresser at the department store Liebes & Co., literally moving objects and displays behind glass this experience—along with a general aesthetic connection to Hollywood films sets and a West Coast sensibility—gave rise to an artistic vision that emphasized spectacle, artifice and visual pleasure Together, these influences—the Bauhaus emphasis on construction and materials combined with the theatrical staging of commercial display—shaped Kasten's distinctive approach to photography as constructed tableaux.
Kasten's work exemplifies a distinctly Southern California aesthetic that contrasts sharply with the Pictures Generation that emerged in New York during the 1980s, centered around Metro Pictures gallery. While the Pictures Generation—including artists like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine—focused on appropriation, media critique, and deconstructing mass culture, Kasten's approach embraced surface pleasure, material luxury, and theatrical construction. The New York artists interrogated authenticity and authorship, often using found images to expose the mechanisms of representation and commodity culture. Kasten, by contrast, celebrated fabrication up to the point of spectacle, building elaborate sets from industrial materials and reveling in the seductive qualities of bold color, reflective surfaces, and optical illusion. Her camera would later turn directly to architecture itself in her Architectural Sites series, in which she engaged with postmodern buildings designed by Michael Graves and Marcel Breuer and erected to support finance and art by building an equally elaborate “stage” with lights and mirrors to reflect the grandeur and deception of the architecture.
Barbara Kasten (b. 1936 in Chicago, Illinois) lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. 
Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe. Most recently, Kasten’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK, Site Lines, was mounted at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-On-Sea, East Sussex, England. Her major survey exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2020), traveled to Sammlung Goetz, Germany (2022-23). Other recent exhibitions include Barbara Kasten: Scenarios, Aspen Art Museum (2020-21); Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2021); the 2020 Busan Biennale: Words at an Exhibition an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems, South Korea; Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, Tate Modern, London (2018); Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and STAGES, a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that traveled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the MOCA Pacific Design Center (2015-16). Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Tate Modern, London; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among many others.

Chicago, Illinois

View objects by this artist.