스킵네비게이션

Born 1936 in Chicago, USA

Lives in Chicago

Barbara KASTEN, Crossover (Düsseldorf), 2016, HD video, color, silent loop, plexiglas, paper, 304.8×213.4×121.9cm

Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York, ©Barbara KASTEN image: Bortolami, NY, Thomas Dane Gallery, Kadel Willborn Gallery, Düsseldorf

 

Barbara KASTEN trained as a painter and textile artist, but in the early 1970s she turned towards photography and began using photographic processes like cyanotype and photosensitive textiles. KASTEN travelled to Europe in the mid-1960s, where she lived and worked for two years; here she was influenced by Constructivist ideas and architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and the Bauhaus movement. László MOHOLY-NAGY’s kinetic sculptures and his works with abstract light effects especially had an impact on her practice. Light, shadow, mirror, and transparency have become key aspects in KASTEN’s work ever since.

She has used mirror, plexiglass, fiberglass screening, reflective metals, plaster, lights, and other props to realize her conceptually-based photographs and installations. For over 40 years KASTEN has investigated and depicted the three-dimensional complexity of these materials on a two-dimensional plane, which can be experienced in most of her work. The interplay of light, color and geometry are the most important in elements in Barbara KASTEN’s lifelong investigation of photography, and it is within this trinity that the artist finds a way to show light’s power to transform materiality.