Artists

Barbara Kasten

Press release

“My work has changed from a photograph as an object to now using the photographic, the essence of photography. Light, photograms, patterns of light and dark contrast, shadows, all of that are photographic properties, but now I’ve taken them solely out of a photograph and used all those in different ways, that’s more physical and more sculptural. One that one can experience more than just looking at it, you’re actually in it.”

The re-enactment of the relationships between body, space, and material has been at the heart of Barbara Kasten’s installations, photographs, and objects for over five decades. Originally trained as a painter and sculptor in the 1960s, in the 1970s Barbara Kasten studied under the renowned representatives of textile art Trude Guermonprez and Magdalena Abakanowicz.

During this period, she began exploring the dynamics between the body and its social environment. At the beginning of her career, this was impressively demonstrated by the textile objects Seated Form (1971/72) and the diazotype prints Figure/Chair (1972/73). The body as an “image-creating element” remains invisible yet decisive in Barbara Kasten’s subsequent abstract groups of works to this day. All abstract motifs are based on analog installations with props such as mirrors, metal grids, or plastic elements in her studio, which Barbara Kasten “stages” with light in relation to her own body. The relevance of the body within Barbara Kasten’s oeuvre was remarkably expressed in the stage design for the Jenkins Dance Academy’s 1985 production of Inside Outside/Stages of Light.

Barbara Kasten’s tenth exhibition, entitled Surrealist Spiral, focuses on the physicality within her work and, for the first time, shows her series of photographs Masks from 1998 alongside her unique cyanotype works Hierophany from 1996, in dialogue with her most recent series of DLWP photographs and Mural Flats from 2023 to 2025. The motifs are both adaptations and abstractions of spatial and physical reality. Their aesthetic is reminiscent of the digital illusions that are part of our contemporary synthetic visual world, yet they are produced using analog techniques.

The images of Masks are based on the surreal staging of male and female bodies in “oneiric light spaces.” The mask as a prop reinforces the “rapture” of the body from our familiar reality toward the abstraction of the psychological. The “light paintings” in the Hierophany series are abstract, impasto cyanotype works. A light-sensitive emulsion was applied to heavyweight paper and exposed to the sun. Through this unique working process, organic, amorphous color reliefs in blue and white were created which, despite their impasto-like characteristics, simultaneously allow the viewer to experience mental transcendence. In fact, the title is also a play on words. In Greek, it combines the meanings of “holy” and “to reveal, to bring to light.” Barbara Kasten’s latest series of DLWP photographs literally embodies the transcendence of real experience into abstract space.

The motifs are based on the staging of her space-filling installation with colored mirrors and geometric plastic objects for her solo exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill in 2023. If one looks closely at the painterly, gestural forms “tamed” by geometric grids, one sees flashes of elements from the coastal landscape of southern England. Similar to Barbara Kasten’s Architectural Site series of the 1980s, real space is here analogously re-staged by Kasten into an abstract composition, dependent solely on her own bodily position and perspective. The freestanding elements Mural Flats are currently also part of her solo exhibition at the Zachęta Museum in Warsaw, where their reflections allow visitors to physically experience the transition between different perceptions of reality.