Barbara Kasten
(American, born 1936)
Biography
Barbara Kasten is a contemporary American artist whose work investigates light and perception through photographs of elaborately constructed acrylic sculptures. Employing mirrors, colored-gels, stage lights, and translucent angled surfaces, the artist’s sculptures transform through photography into gem-like abstractions. “For my earliest Constructs, made in the 1970s, I built life-size, trestle-like forms to work in tandem with mirrors. I designed and photographed these structures with the aim of upsetting normal conceptions of how perspective should work,” she explained. “I considered the Constructs to be similar to stage sets, and my photographs of them look like impossible landscapes.” Born in Chicago, IL in 1936, Kasten studied painting and textiles at the University of Arizona before going on to receive her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts. During the mid-1960s, deeply influenced by aesthetics of the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, the architecture of Le Corbusier, and the Constructivists Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova, Kasten began producing her first assemblages. Despite widespread acclaim for her work, it was not until 2015 that the artist was the subject of her first museum retrospective, “Barbara Kasten: Stages,” which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She continues to live and work in Chicago, IL. Today, Kasten’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among others.
Barbara Kasten Artworks
Barbara Kasten
(114 results)
Barbara Kasten
Architectural Site 10, December 22, 1986, 1986
Sale Date: July 5, 2023
Auction Closed
English (US)
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