Barbara Kasten

Barbara Kasten, born in Chicago in 1936, is one of the most influential contemporary artists. In over 50 years, she has created an impressive body of work that includes photographs, sculptures, expansive objects, and complex multimedia installations.

Trained as a painter and sculptor, Barbara Kasten was acquainted with the ideas of the Bauhaus during a stay in Germany from 1964 to 1967, becoming enthusiastic about its interdisciplinary approach, and taking an interest in the interaction of architecture, space, textiles, stage, light, and color. Out of this interest and influenced by the Californian "Light and Space Movement" of the 1970s, Barbara Kasten developed an approach to abstract photography that remains completely autonomous to this day. Her cross-genre practice, which used analog means to anticipate the digital image vocabulary of Photoshop or 3D rendering, has influenced a new generation of contemporary artists today.

Barbara Kasten was born in the United States in 1936 and lives and works in Chicago. Her works are included in institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Centre Pompidou Paris, the Tate Modern London, the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum Washington DC, the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. In 2024 her up-coming solo exhibition is at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK. Solo exhibitions took place at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; the Aspen Art Museum (both 2020); the Philara Collection in Düsseldorf, Germany (2018); the ICA Philadelphia (2015), and the MoCA Los Angeles (2016). Her work has been part of international group exhibitions, including "Women in Abstraction" at the Centre Pompidou, the Sharjah Biennial 14, "Bauhaus and America," LWL - Landesmuseum Münster, "History of Photography" at Sprengel Museum Hannover, "Shape of Light" at Tate Modern London, and „Color Mania“ at Fotomuseum Winterthur. Lately the Ingvild Goetz Collection dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to her (2023). In 2023, several works were included in the exhibition "Re-Inventing Piet. Mondrian and the Consequences" at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Also the publishing house Skira Editore released the large-scale monograph "Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015-2020)" by Stephanie Cristello (ed.), Hans Ulrich Obrist, Humberto Moro and Mimi Zeiger.