What is a photograph, really? Is it simply an image on a two-dimensional surface? What if it could be more?
These are some of the questions the Chicago-born artist Barbara Kasten seeks to pose and answer in her complex photographic works, which straddle printmaking, sculpture, and textile combinations.
Kasten’s first exposure to art was through a nun at her Catholic school, who introduced Kasten to works at the Art Institute of Chicago. Those experiences set her on a path to pursue a formal education studying painting and sculpture, before developing an interest in photography.
“It just seemed to be part of my DNA” she says while laughing in an interview with Art21 as part of the PBS series “Art in the Twenty-First Century.”
A stint living in Germany studying Bauhaus philosophies inspired Kasten to incorporate certain forms of geometric abstraction into her work, which often resembles the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy and other Constructivists.
Barbara Kasten, (1986). Cibachrome © Barbara Kasten, Courtesy the artist.
To create her elaborate photographs and videos, Kasten creates scenes in her studio using props, theatrical lighting, mirrors, and other objects that are manipulated through her lens.
“I always think of myself as actually photographing the shadows, not the light. I never think of photography as recording life in general,” she tells Art21, adding: “it was an experimental medium.”
The optical illusions that result are destabilizing and often challenging in the way they contend with space, light, and objecthood.
This summer, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is staging the largest solo show of Kasten’s work in Europe, with a survey of her decades-long career, spanning her first forays into the medium, as well as her early sculptures and most recent work in video.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
