LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents Barbara Kasten: Stages, the first major monographic survey of work by artist Barbara Kasten. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, in conversation with the artist and with full access to her extensive archive, the exhibition includes approximately 60 works spanning nearly five decades of Kasten’s career. MOCA’s presentation of the touring exhibition is the final stop, following presentations at the ICA Philadelphia and the Graham Foundation, Chicago. This exhibition brings together major bodies of work from the 1970s to the present, contextualizing for the first time Kasten’s earliest fiber sculptures, mixed media works, cyanotype prints, photographic series, and forays into set design, alongside selected archival material and video documentation.
Barbara Kasten: Stages situates Kasten’s work within current conversations around sculpture, abstraction, and photography, tracing its roots to the unique and provocative intersection of Bauhaus-influenced pedagogy in America, the California Light and Space movement, and postmodernism. Kasten’s concern with the interplay between three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms, her interest in staging and the role of the prop, her cross-disciplinary process, and the way she has developed new approaches to abstraction and materiality are relevant to younger generations of artists working today.
Barbara Kasten (born 1936, Chicago; lives and works in Chicago) trained as a painter and textile artist, receiving her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1970. There she studied with pioneering fiber artist Trude Guermonprez, a former teacher at Black Mountain College and associate of Anni Albers. In 1971, Kasten received a Fulbright to travel to Poznan, Poland, to work with noted sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz. During the 1980s, she embarked on her Construct series, which incorporated life-size elements such as metal, wire, mesh, and mirrors into installations produced specifically for the camera. Kasten was one of the first artists to be invited by Polaroid to use its new large-format film, and it was with this that she made many of her best-known works. Her palette became bolder in response to the lush, saturated quality of the medium.
In the mid-1980s, Kasten stepped out of the studio and began working with large architectural spaces symbolic of both economic and cultural capital. Institutions such as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, designed by Richard Meier, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, designed by Arata Isozaki, as well as the World Financial Center in New York, designed by César Pelli, were eager to showcase their new postmodern buildings via the cinematic lighting, mirrors, and fabrications that were part of her monumental productions. Kasten’s most recent work has taken her back to the studio, where she has explored a more minimal palette using many of the same materials that shaped her early constructed photographs. Over the years her vocabulary and interests have provided a through line and given a unity to her artwork, even as she has experimented with multiple processes, from cyanotypes and Polaroids to Cibachromes and video installations.
Kasten’s photographs are included in the collections of major museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the ICA Philadelphia and JRP Ringier. It includes a biography of the artist, a conversation between Kasten and artist Liz Deschenes, and new scholarly essays by curator Alex Klein and art historians Alex Kitnick and Jenni Sorkin.
Barbara Kasten: Stages is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and is curated by ICA Curator Alex Klein.
